I cannot account for how much of that shift was genuine understanding and how much was her wanting the conflict to be over. Both of those things can produce the same behavior. What I can account for is what she did: she corrected the record with the family members she had misled. She apologized. She let the apology stand without immediately trying to explain it away.
That is more than I knew to expect. It is not everything I might have wanted. It is real.
## A Note on Elise’s Apology
Elise gave me a formal apology, eventually. Not the first conversation, not the coffee shop one. A later one, after the wedding, after some of the heat of it had cooled.
She wrote it in a text. Long, for a text — maybe four or five substantial paragraphs. She said she had relied on our mother as an intermediary when she knew she should have come to me directly. She said she had told herself a story about why she didn’t need to confirm my consent because she wanted the dress and the story was more comfortable than the truth. She said she understood what the embroidery meant and that she was sorry she had let the cuff be cut without intervening when she still could have. She said she was trying to do better at asking the people she loved directly for the things she wanted.
I read the text twice and then I sat with it for a while.