Chapter 8
I told her that the call was the most important phone call anyone had made to me in four years.
She accepted that without making it more than it was, which was, I thought, the measure of her.
The lake house stands. The accounts stand. Margaret's pearl necklace had been returned, by Vanessa's attorney, the week after the meeting, and I have it now in the box on my dresser where I keep the things that were hers, and someday I will figure out what to do with it, but for now it is enough that it is back where it belongs.
I do not know what I am going to do about my son. I do not know what I am going to do about Marissa. Those are questions for a later version of myself, one who has had enough time and enough quiet to understand what kind of relationship, if any, I want to build on the foundation of what I now know about them. The foundation is not what I believed it was. I am still deciding what can be built on it, and whether I want to try, and what trying would cost.
What I know, standing on the dock in February with the gray water in front of me and the porch behind me and the lavender Margaret planted slowly coming back in the garden, is that I was almost lost. I was almost moved into an approved facility by the people I had been carrying since they were born, signed over and set aside, the way you set aside a thing that has finished being useful. I was almost another story about a lonely widower who trusted the wrong people with the wrong things.
I was not, in the end, that story.
Because a woman with red eyes and shaking hands locked a door and pressed play and gave me back my life before I had finished giving it away.
May you like
That is the story I am living now. The rest, whatever comes next with my children or without them, is the story I have not written yet.
I intend to write it on my own terms.
