The twenty-four hundred dollars is gone. I have made my peace with that number, mostly. It was not nothing, and I don’t pretend it was nothing, but it was the cost of having signed a contract in good faith for something I believed in at the time I signed it, and good faith is not a mistake even when it costs you.
What I have learned — what I am still learning — is that being willing to help is not the same as being wanted, and that I had been conflating those two things for a long time in my relationship with Claire. I could fill a need. I could sign the contract. I could write the check. But filling a need is not the same as being invited in, and if all I was doing was filling needs, I was building a relationship on a foundation that was going to shift the moment the need disappeared.
I am not done with my sister. I am not interested in being done with my sister. But I am done with the version of our relationship in which my contribution to her life was primarily logistical and financial and she was primarily the recipient. We are figuring out something different. It is slower than I would like and less resolved than a story is supposed to be, but it is real.
Last month, for the first time in I cannot remember how long, Claire called me without a reason. Not to process something. Not to ask for input or help or financial analysis. Just to talk, because it was a Tuesday evening and she was taking a walk and she thought of me.