She was right. He knew that. Everyone in my family knows that. It is one of the things they cite when they want to praise my competence.
The irony being that the competence they cite was built exactly because the safety net wasn’t there.
Sophie and I talked for about two hours. By the end I knew what I was going to do and roughly in what order, and I had eaten enough of the takeout that I was thinking more clearly, and the Côtes du Rhône was empty.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said, when she was putting on her coat.
“I know,” I said.
“I mean in the broader sense. Not just this situation. In general.”
I said, “I know that too.”
She left. I washed the takeout containers and put them in the recycling. I went to bed at a reasonable hour and slept better than I had in two weeks.
That is what good friends do. They don’t solve anything. They just make the room steady enough that you can do the solving yourself.
The Records and What They Actually Said
When I went through the folder — the school stuff folder, the family stuff folder, the accumulated documentation of six years of alternative routes — I was looking for evidence that would help me trust my own memory.
What I found was both simpler and more complicated than I expected.
The simpler part: the records were exactly what I remembered. Tuition statements. Grant award letters. Loan disbursement notices. Work schedules I’d emailed to myself. The birthday card. The email from my mother.