“She said that to you directly.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew that didn’t sound like me.”
Long pause. “I knew I hadn’t heard it from you,” she said. “I kept thinking — I told myself — that Mom had already sorted it out with you and I was just being anxious.”
“You could have texted me.”
“I know.”
“It would have taken thirty seconds.”
“I know, Mara. I know.”
There was a long silence.
“The embroidery,” I said. “On the cuff. Do you know what that took?”
“Mom said you’d be able to fix it.”
“Mom says a lot of things that aren’t accurate, apparently.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But Elise — do you know what nine months of hand embroidery means? Not because you should have known, specifically, but I need to understand if you understood at all what you were asking to wear.”
Another silence, longer this time. “I understood it was something you’d made yourself,” she said. “I told myself it was family. That you’d be okay with it eventually. I didn’t let myself think about the embroidery specifically.”
“You didn’t want to think about it.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
This is the part I respect most about Elise, in retrospect: she didn’t lie to me about her own motivations. She told me the true thing, even though it didn’t cast her in a good light. She had been afraid to look at the full shape of what she was doing, so she had looked at the part that was comfortable and turned away from the rest. That is human. It is also a failure. Those two things can both be true.