She wrote back, briefly. She said she was glad the process had gone as he intended. She said that he had been a thoughtful client who had taken the process seriously.
I folded her note and put it in the same drawer where I keep the birthday card he’d kept, and the photograph of the young man squinting against the sun.
These are the things I have. The text. The photograph. The note from his attorney. The birthday card he kept for seven years.
And the knowledge that when the time came, I did see. He made sure I would.
## Conditional Contact
It’s been fourteen months since my father died. In that time, Vanessa and I have been in contact approximately once a month, usually by text, occasionally by phone. The quality of the contact is careful. We talk around certain things. We have not had a second version of the February conversation, partly because I’m not ready and partly because I’m not sure what more there is to say.
I’m not estranged from her. I’m also not close to her in the way that sisters can be close, in the way that I’d always imagined we might eventually become, the way that happens sometimes in families when children become adults and the old dynamics give way to something more equal.
Maybe that still happens. I genuinely don’t know.
What I’ve arrived at is this: I’m willing to be her sister. I’m willing to show up to the things that families show up to, to maintain the connection that blood and shared history create. I’m not willing to pretend the October reading didn’t happen, or to accept an account of events that I don’t believe, or to act as though the February half-admission was a full one.