Maybe. Probably the in-writing piece, yes. But I made the decision in good faith in the relationship I had with my sister in September, and the relationship I had with my sister in September was one in which these conversations happened without fine print, because fine print implies distrust and I did not distrust her.
The twenty-four hundred is the cost of that trust, and of the circumstances that disrupted it. I did not ask Claire to pay it back. I did not bring it up in the Brooklyn conversation. I absorbed it as a loss that was mine to absorb, because it was — I was the one who’d written the check and signed the contract and made the offer, and even though what happened afterward was not my fault, the money was mine and the decision to spend it was mine.
She sent me a check six weeks after the wedding. Two thousand four hundred dollars, with a note that said: “Not a loan repayment. A late thank-you for September.”
I looked at the check for a while. Then I deposited it.
I sent her a text: “Received. Thank you.”
She sent back: “I’ve been thinking about it since March.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I know. That’s the point.”
I don’t know what to do with the gesture except accept it, which I did. It was not an accounting resolution. It was something else — a recognition that the twenty-four hundred mattered, that she knew it mattered, and that she was in a position to do something about it and she chose to. I don’t think the check made us even; I don’t think evenness is the right frame for relationships. I think it was her way of saying that she had noticed a thing and was responding to it.