“I’m not sure what you want me to do,” he said.
“I’m not asking you to fix it,” I said. “I’m telling you so you actually know. You’ve been thanking me for supporting you. You texted me that you were glad I was being supportive. I haven’t told anyone yes. I just wanted you to know what’s real.”
He nodded. He looked tired in a way that was different from his usual distracted energy.
“Are you going to say no?” he asked. “To the twenty-five thousand.”
“I can’t give you twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s almost everything I have. That’s not a decision I can make and recover from quickly.”
He didn’t argue with that. He said he understood. He said he was going to need to talk to Olivia. He said he was also going to need to talk to their parents.
“What are you going to say to them?” I asked.
He looked at the table. “I don’t know yet. But I don’t think I can keep accepting the version where you got a scholarship and this is no big deal.”
That was not everything. It was not the full acknowledgment of fourteen years. But it was the first time anyone in my immediate family had said the scholarship story wasn’t accurate.
I ate the rest of my sandwich. Ethan drank his coffee. We talked, for a few minutes, about nothing in particular — the exhibit again, a TV show we’d both been watching — and it felt strange and also ordinary in the way that important conversations often end: not with a resolution exactly, but with the world slightly rearranged and both people still needing lunch.