This was not a triumphant experience. I want to say that clearly. There is a version of this story where the corrections feel vindicating, where each phone call my mother made restored something that had been taken. That’s not what it felt like.
What it felt like was more like watching someone dismantle a piece of furniture they’d built wrong the first time. The process is awkward and there are leftover parts and the result is structurally different but not necessarily beautiful. The story was corrected. The correction didn’t give me back six years of extra effort or four hundred bus rides or the nineteen months it took to repay the last of my loans after I thought I was finally clear.
My father called me separately, about two weeks after the family meeting. This call was brief and I think he found it hard to make.
He said he wanted me to know that the April decision, the one he’d described as a hard choice at the time, wasn’t something he was comfortable with in retrospect. He said he thought he’d taken the easier path twice — first when he redirected the money and then when he let Linda’s explanation stand. He didn’t say he should have done differently with more flair or regret than the words themselves carried. He just said it, which was the most my father was likely to say.
I said I appreciated him telling me.
He said he hoped we were okay.
I said we were getting there.