“I know,” she said. “Mara told me what it said when we went through the complete document.”
“So you’ve read it,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you understand why I couldn’t just let Tuesday night stand.”
“Yes,” she said. Again. Different in quality from the first one.
We talked for another twenty minutes. Not resolution — I don’t know if resolution is the right word for anything that ends like this. We talked about Dad, about the Christmas comment, about the ways he’d communicated badly about things he felt deeply. We talked about what it had been like to be each other’s sister, which is a thing we hadn’t really done in years.
It was not a tearful reconciliation. It was two adults having an honest conversation that had been needed for a long time, in the specific context of a loss that had forced the conversation to happen. I don’t know if we came out of it closer. I think we came out of it clearer about what we were actually dealing with, which is not nothing.
She did not apologize in a way that fully acknowledged what she’d done. The closest she got was: “I should have told you right away that the copy might not be complete.”
I let it be what it was.
## The Accounting
The final accounting came in April, seven months after my father died.
The house proceeds were in. The investment accounts had been valued and the fees and expenses had been tallied. The numbers were close to what had been projected.