## What Vanessa Doesn’t Know I Know
There’s something I haven’t told Vanessa. I probably won’t.
Mara Chen’s assistant called me, once, during the estate process, about a scheduling matter — a small thing, easily resolved. In the course of the call, she mentioned something in passing: that my father had made two separate appointments in the months before his death, and that the second one, the one that produced the amendment, had been his idea specifically. That he’d called to schedule it. That he’d had specific language he wanted included.
She may not have been supposed to tell me this. It wasn’t confidential in any formal sense, but it was the kind of detail that doesn’t usually come up. I think she’d been with Mara Chen for a long time and understood what the amendment had been about and wanted me to know.
What it told me was that the amendment wasn’t something Mara Chen had suggested as part of a routine review. It was something my father had thought of, had picked up the phone about, had made an appointment for. He had an idea and he acted on it and he made sure it was done right.
He’d called the office. He’d sat down with the attorney. He’d said: I want to add something, and here’s what it should say.
That’s a deliberate act. Not a passive one, not a routine one. He decided to do it and he did it.
I think about that sometimes when I’m not sure how to feel about what happened between us — the distance and the Christmas comment and all the other things. He decided to do it and he did it. Whatever else was true, that’s also true.