The competing narratives were not going to resolve themselves. Someone was going to have to get everyone in a room and be honest about what had actually happened and what they had actually said. That someone turned out to be Owen, quietly and without announcing that’s what he was doing.
He spent those four days, as near as I can reconstruct, reading the contract, looking at the text thread, asking Claire to walk him through the sequence of events in her own words, and then asking her clarifying questions until the sequence in her words and the sequence in the text thread aligned. He did this with, by his account, no accusation and no drama. He was fact-finding.
By the end of those four days, he had a reasonably accurate picture.
## Becca Again
Becca called me a second time, this time at nine in the evening on a weeknight, which suggested she was calling from home after a day at work and after enough of the evening had passed that she’d given herself permission to make the call.
“Owen talked to Claire last night,” she said.
“I know he was going to.”
“It was a long conversation. She cried a lot. I wasn’t there but she called me after.”
“What did she say?”
“She said he asked her to explain what you had actually said at Christmas. Like, the exact words, not her interpretation. And when she said them out loud — her words — she could hear how they were different from what she’d been saying they meant.”