More than he expressed. The whole thing is in that phrase. He knew. He knew what he hadn’t said, and he put on record that he knew, and he went to the trouble of making that permanent.
I don’t read it often. But when I do, I’m glad it exists.
## The Call I Finally Made
About four months after the estate closed, I called Vanessa on a Saturday afternoon. Not about anything practical — there was nothing left to handle. Just to call.
She sounded surprised, in the way of someone who has been bracing for a certain kind of contact and received a different kind instead. We talked for twenty minutes about nothing much. Her kids. A renovation project she and Theo were doing. Something I’d read that I thought she might find interesting.
It was not the conversation that fixes everything. It was a conversation, which is different.
I’ve made a few of those calls since. Not many. But a few. The quality of them has been careful on both sides, which is not warmth exactly, but isn’t coldness either. It’s the quality of two people feeling their way toward something they’re not sure exists yet.
I don’t know what we’ll end up being to each other. Sisters, at minimum, in the structural sense — there at the things families require attendance at, connected by the fact of having had the same father. Possibly more than that, someday. Possibly not.
I’ve stopped needing to know. Which is maybe the thing that happened, after all of this, that I’d call the most significant. I stopped needing the story to resolve into a clear shape. I can hold the unresolved thing and keep going. That turns out to be its own kind of strength.