He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: ‘I called you from her version of it. I didn’t have the full information and I was already inside her framing of the situation before I talked to you about it.’
I said: ‘I know.’
He said: ‘That’s not okay.’
I said: ‘It wasn’t great.’
He said: ‘I’m sorry.’
I believed him. Not completely — apologies in the moment of conversation are easy to believe and harder to trust over time — but in that moment, at my kitchen table, I believed that he was genuinely trying to understand what he had done and what it had cost me. That was something I had not been sure I was going to get from him, and getting it changed the texture of the evening.
We talked for another two hours. About our mother, about what growing up in that house had taught each of us about what family required, about the specific way that the phrase ‘keep this in the family’ had been used to mean ‘keep this invisible’ in a way that we had both absorbed and were both, in our different ways, trying to learn to question. It was one of the more honest conversations Luke and I have ever had, and it happened because he asked a real question and I gave him a real answer.
He left the next morning for his meeting. Before he went he said: ‘I’m going to call her more. I think she needs that, and I think it’s mine to do.’ I said that I thought that was right. He nodded. We hugged at the door.