I don’t know exactly when she decided what to do. I don’t know if there was a decision, in the sense of a clear choice made at a specific moment, or if it was something that happened more gradually — a noticing, an avoiding, a series of small adjustments that accumulated into an outcome.
She had the copy. She’d had it for some time, she said. She’d looked at it, presumably, before deciding to gather everyone Tuesday evening. At some point during that review she had encountered a page numbered three and a page numbered four, and a gap between them. Or she hadn’t encountered it, because she already knew it was missing from the copy she had.
Both possibilities exist. I sat with them for a long time, trying to determine which seemed more consistent with what I knew about my sister, and I could not do it. I knew Vanessa in the way that sisters know each other — thoroughly and not at all, with enormous intimacy and enormous blind spots. The question of what she had consciously known and intended was a question I could not answer from the outside.
What I could say was this: the gap was visible. The page numbers were on the document. Anyone reading it with attention would notice the jump. Vanessa was an attentive person by nature — organized, detail-oriented, the person who remembered the small logistics that everyone else forgot.
What I could also say was this: the waiver she’d drafted was not the action of someone who was confident she was presenting the complete picture. If she’d genuinely believed she had the full document, there would be no reason to ask everyone to confirm their agreement with the distribution before anyone had seen the document from the professional who held the original.