What he’d written on page three was about our relationship. About the calls, the distance managed. It was not a critique of Vanessa. He hadn’t written, on that page, that she had failed him or that he loved me more. He’d written what he specifically valued about what specifically existed between us. It was particular and it was his.
But it was also implicitly a corrective. He’d written it four months after Christmas, after the comment that had stung, after an eleven-day silence and then a text. He’d gone to Mara Chen and added a page to his will, which is not the action of a person who is satisfied with how things stand between himself and someone he loves.
Vanessa had read that. She’d sat with Mara Chen and read the complete document, in the formal context of the probate process, and read what her father had written about her sister. I thought about that sometimes — what that had been like, specifically, to encounter those words in that context.
I’m not sure it changed what she’d done. I’m also not sure it didn’t explain something about the February call — the quality of her voice when she admitted she’d probably noticed something off about the page. Whether the thing she noticed was its absence or its contents, I still didn’t know.
## The Last Conversation I Had With My Father
Eleven days before he died, he sent me the text. But the last actual conversation we had was two days before that, the Sunday call.