I was still thinking about the Christmas comment he’d made. The one about Vanessa being the responsible one. I’d replayed it, probably, a hundred times. What I’d landed on, eventually, was that it hadn’t been entirely unfair. Vanessa had been more physically present, had done more visible work, and my father — being the kind of person he was — had named that out loud without thinking about what he was also implying. The text that followed, eleven days before his death, was the correction. Or the beginning of one.
He hadn’t had time to finish the correction in conversation. He’d done it in the document, which was the kind of thing he would do: put it in writing, consider it settled, not realize there was still a conversation required.
## The Conversation That Still Needed to Happen
Vanessa and I had not talked directly about what had happened between us since the Friday phone call, four days after the funeral, when she’d offered the older-copy explanation. We’d communicated about estate logistics through email. We’d been civil. We’d been exactly as civil as two people can be when they are avoiding the thing they need to address.
She called me in February, three months after the funeral, on a Sunday afternoon.
I almost didn’t answer. I sat there looking at her name on my screen and made the choice to pick up.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“About what?” I said.
“About whether I want to say something to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Say it.”