“I wanted to check in on you,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You seemed upset last night.”
“I was upset last night.”
A pause. “Hannah, I know this has been hard. It’s been hard for both of us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Dad loved you,” she said. “He just — you know how he was with certain things. He wasn’t always good at saying it.”
I noticed that she was speaking about him in the past tense with a fluency I didn’t have yet. She’d had more practice at this particular kind of loss, in the way that people who have been caretakers do — they start grieving earlier, during, and by the time the formal moment arrives they are already somewhere further down the road.
“The page numbers,” I said.
“Hannah–“
“I’m not trying to fight. I’m asking a simple question. The page numbers don’t match. Was there something on page three?”
A longer pause than before. “The copy I have is old. I’ve had it for a while. There may have been a version change — I don’t know. I told you, it might be a formatting thing.”
“Both the second and third pages are numbered,” I said. “The first section is numbered. If the formatting skipped a number it would be on a page that wasn’t part of the main text. The jump is in the middle of the body.”
I’d been thinking about this since the previous night. The structure of the document was clear once I’d examined it. There was a title section. There were numbered substantive pages. The jump from two to four occurred in the middle of a clause, not between sections.