I smiled and said something neutral and we moved on to another subject.
Vanessa heard it too. She didn’t respond to it either. I wonder sometimes what she heard — whether it landed as validation of what she’d spent three years building, or whether some part of her registered that it was also a kind of unfairness toward me. I don’t know. We’ve never talked about that specific moment.
He must have thought about it afterward. That’s what the text tells me — that he thought about it, that he decided it wasn’t fair, that he did the thing he knew how to do. He couldn’t unsay it, couldn’t have the conversation that would have contextualized it or withdrawn it. But he could add a page to a document.
In some ways the page is more durable than a retraction. It’s still there. It’ll be there after everyone who was in that living room in October is gone. I don’t find much comfort in that, exactly — I’d have preferred the conversation — but I find something in it. He tried. He got to Mara Chen’s office and he tried.
## March
In March, five months after my father died, I was walking to work — I walk to work when the weather allows, it’s one of my favorite parts of the day — and I passed a plant in a window that looked like the fern in the photograph.
I stopped and looked at it for longer than made sense. A person coming out of the building looked at me looking at it with the expression of someone who has misjudged the situation.