A pause. Not a dramatic pause — an actual one, the kind where you can tell someone is making themselves continue.
“I think I knew the copy was incomplete,” she said. “I don’t know that I knew exactly what was missing. But I think I noticed and I decided not to look at it too closely.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s the most honest I can be,” she said. “I can’t tell you I knew it was an amendment with money in it. I can tell you I think I noticed something was off and I didn’t pursue it.”
“The waiver,” I said.
A longer pause. “The waiver was a mistake,” she said. “It was me trying to — I don’t know. Close something before it opened.”
“Did you know Dad had added something?” I said. “Before the reading — did you know?”
“I knew he’d been talking to Mara,” she said. “He mentioned it once and I didn’t ask what for. I told myself I didn’t want to know.”
I sat with this. It was not a full confession. It was also not the older-copy story, which I’d never quite believed. It was something in between — the thing that might actually be true, which was that Vanessa had looked at a gap and made a choice not to look harder, and then had built a narrative around that choice.
“I need you to understand,” I said, “that what he wrote on that page — what he put in there — that mattered to me. Not just the money. He wrote something about why he was including me.”