I said I hadn’t been guarded at her, specifically. She said she knew that. She said the guarded had made more sense now.
I asked what Ethan had told her about the situation from his perspective.
She said he’d told her he thought he’d been handed an easy story and had accepted it because it was easy and because he hadn’t had reason to question it. She said he’d told her he felt guilty about that but was trying not to turn his guilt into a performance.
“That’s very self-aware of him,” I said.
“He’s been working on it,” she said, and her tone had a wryness I appreciated. She knew he had a way to go. She wasn’t pretending otherwise.
We talked for almost two hours. At the end of it, she asked if I’d be willing to be part of occasional family things — not as an obligation, not as a commitment to a level of warmth we hadn’t earned yet, but as a real option.
I said yes. I said I’d always wanted family things to work better. That had always been true. I just hadn’t been willing to perform the working when it wasn’t.
She said she understood that. She said she’d try to make sure things actually worked rather than just appeared to.
I believed her. Not because she was a magical solution to the family dynamics but because she seemed like a practical person who took information seriously and updated accordingly. That is, genuinely, most of what you can ask of someone.