She honored his work. That’s the simplest way I can say it. He’d taken the trouble to come to her office and have a thing done right, and she made sure it stayed right, even when the informal version of events was trying to be something different.
That matters. The professionals who do their work carefully and don’t cut corners when cutting corners would be easier — they’re part of why things can go right, when things go right.
## Two Years Out
I didn’t intend to write any of this down. And then I did.
Not for any particular purpose at first. I’d start sentences in my head during my commute, thinking about the reading, about Mara Chen’s office, about the text message, and eventually it seemed easier to write them down than to keep carrying them.
Two years is long enough that some things have clarified and some haven’t.
What’s clarified: I know what happened. Not every detail of what Vanessa knew or intended, but what she did and what the outcome was. I know what the document said. I know what the amendment said. I know that the formal process worked because I asked it to, and that not asking would have produced a different result.
What hasn’t clarified: what my father and I would have talked about, if he’d had more time. Whether the conversation he’d been working up to on that last Sunday call was the thing in the text or something else. What the fern meant. Whether Vanessa and I will find our way to something more genuine than careful distance, or whether careful distance is what this looks like in the long run.