He also had what I understand was a very difficult conversation with Claire.
I wasn’t there for it. I heard about it from Becca, who heard about it from Claire, and by the time it reached me it was filtered through several layers of emotional translation, but the substance seemed to be this: Owen told Claire that he thought she had handled the situation with me unfairly, that he wanted me at the wedding, and that he thought they needed to find a way to make the finances work even if it meant scaling back other things.
Claire, by Becca’s account, cried. Not in a manipulative way. In the way that people cry when someone they love tells them something accurate and hard.
She called me that Thursday evening. Owen’s Friday deadline was the next day. She said she had talked to Owen and they wanted to have a real conversation with me, and could I come to the city that weekend.
I said yes.
## The Meeting at Their Apartment
Owen and Claire live in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that is small and very organized and reflects Claire’s aesthetic preferences in every detail: the carefully chosen throw pillows, the gallery wall, the kitchen with the open shelving and the matching containers. I had been there four or five times over the three years they’d lived together. It was clearly a home, which I mean in the sense that it felt inhabited and intentional, and I always felt slightly too big for it, not physically but in the way that a presence can be too big for a space.