That was the beginning of Luke and I becoming the kind of siblings we should probably have been working on becoming for a while. It took my mother taking out a loan in my name to get us to sit at my kitchen table and talk about our family honestly. I don’t know if that is ironic or just true.
## What Denise Said the Third Time
My mother called me a third time, about a month after the second call. This call was shorter and different in tone from the others.
She said: ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. About consent.’
I said: ‘Okay.’
She said: ‘I don’t think I understood what you meant at the time. I was too — I was focused on defending myself. But I’ve been thinking about it and I understand better now what you were saying.’
I said: ‘What do you understand?’
She said: ‘That it wasn’t mine to decide. It wasn’t mine to do, even if I thought I could manage it. It wasn’t mine.’
I want to be careful about how I describe what that sentence was to me. It was not a resolution. It was not the thing that made it okay. It was one sentence, in one phone call, from a woman who had said a lot of things over the preceding months, and the track record of the preceding months was not a foundation I could build much on yet.
But it was also the first time she had said something that did not have an implied ‘but’ attached to it. It wasn’t mine — full stop. No but. No however. No acknowledgment that was also a pivot toward asking me for something.