The wine was a Côtes du Rhône she’d opened a few months before and never finished. She brought the bottle with the cork stuck back in it, approximately one glass less than full. I made tea for myself because I’d had too much coffee that day.
We sat at my kitchen table and I went through everything. She didn’t tell me what I felt. She didn’t tell me what to do. She asked specific questions that helped me organize what I already knew.
“What do you actually want to happen?” was one.
“I want to say no and I want the scholarship story to stop,” I said.
“Okay. Those are two things. Which one do you need to do first?”
“I need to say no before anything else happens with the venue.”
“Is anything happening with the venue right now that you can’t stop?”
“I don’t know. There might already be a deposit.”
“Did you sign a deposit?”
“No.”
“Then whatever deposit exists is not your obligation.” She said this with the calm of someone who had heard enough of my billing office experience to understand contracts.
I asked her what she thought I should do about Ethan.
She said she thought I should tell him what actually happened, and that the outcome of that conversation mattered but I couldn’t control it.
“What if he doesn’t believe me?” I asked.
“He’ll believe you,” she said. “He might be uncomfortable about what it means, but he’ll believe you. He knows you’re not a person who invents financial details.”