What I knew was that my father had made a deliberate choice to add a page, and that page was in the document, and the document was being administered correctly. That was the thing that had actually happened.
## Deb’s Version
Deb texted me about three months after the funeral. Not a long message, but more than she usually sent.
*I keep thinking about that Tuesday night. I saw the page numbers. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything right away. I should have. I also want you to know I think your dad’s message to you was sweet. He was always a little sideways with his feelings but you could tell he had them.*
I wrote back: *Thank you for calling me about the waiver. That mattered more than you know.*
She wrote: *I almost didn’t. I was sitting there thinking it’s not my place and then I thought, well, is it anyone’s place then?*
I thought about that for a while.
The people who don’t do the obvious thing — the people who see the page numbers and say nothing, who receive the waiver and sign it without reading it, who decide it’s not their place — they’re not bad people. They’re people who don’t want to be in the middle of something. I’d been one of those people, in other situations, more times than I cared to count.
What Deb’s call had done was give me something to act on at the right moment. The waiver. The timing. The fact that she’d noticed the page numbers too — that I wasn’t the only person who had registered the gap. These things mattered, and they mattered because she’d done the slightly uncomfortable thing of picking up the phone.