Pete should write a book.” He says his knees hurt too much to sit at a desk that long. Ethan laughed. It felt like the most uncomplicated laugh he’d had in a while, and he noted that without making too much of it. The things that had been complicated remained complicated. That was the honest accounting of January, February, and into March.

two people rebuilding their relationship without the scaffolding of the arrangement that had accidentally built it in the first place. It turned out that the contract, for all its problems, had provided structure that real life didn’t automatically replace. There were days when Victoria reverted to the CEO version of herself. Not because she was performing, but because that version was the most practiced, the most automatic, and the work of being different took energy she didn’t always have.

There were days when Ethan went quiet in the way of people who are carrying something they haven’t figured out how to put down. They had arguments, not screaming arguments. Neither of them was built for screaming, but the careful pressurized kind where two people who are both accustomed to being right about things find themselves wrong in front of each other and have to work out what to do with that.

The first real one happened in February over something so logistically specific that the specifics barely mattered, which is usually how it goes with arguments that are actually about something else. Victoria had scheduled an event, a foundation board dinner on a Friday evening that Ethan had marked as Lily’s school play.

She’d missed it on her calendar. Not maliciously, just the way things get missed when your calendar has 47 items on it and you’re running three overlapping timelines. I’ll send someone to record it, she said when Ethan pointed out the conflict. That’s not the point, he said. She’ll have the video say she needs you there, Victoria, not a video. Victoria looked at him.

I have 32 people attending this dinner. The foundation director is flying in from DC. I can’t cancel. I’m not asking you to cancel anything, he said. I’m telling you that Lily is going to look out from that stage and want to see your face in the audience. And a video doesn’t do that. I’ll make it up to her.

I’ll take her somewhere. We’ll do something special. You can’t make up a moment after it’s gone. He said, “You know that. You know that better than most people.” The conversation stopped. Victoria stood in the kitchen with the expression of someone who has been handed a truth they weren’t ready for, which is one of the least comfortable things a person can be handed.

He’d invoked, without stating it, her father. The decades of work that had seemed like the right priority until it was too late to rep prioritize. He’d invoked it because it was relevant and because he was honest, and he stood with the discomfort of having been honest in a way that landed harder than he’d planned.

That wasn’t fair, she said. Her voice was even, but it was work. It was accurate, he said. I’m sorry it wasn’t fair. She turned and went to her office and closed the door. Not a slam, a click. The same click Lily used. He stood in the kitchen and didn’t follow because she needed 10 minutes. And he knew that about her.

And after 10 minutes, she came back out and sat at the kitchen table and said, “I’ll rearrange the dinner. Push it to Saturday. You don’t have to. It’s I want to. She looked at him. You were right the way you said it was. It was a lot. But you were right. She looked at the table. I’ve spent a long time choosing the thing with the clearest deadline.

The foundation dinner has a date. Lily’s play has a date. But one of those dates can move and one can’t. She paused. My father moved the wrong things for 30 years. I don’t want to do that. He sat down across from her. I shouldn’t have said it the way I said it. No, but I needed to hear it the way you said it. She looked at him.

That’s one of the harder things about this, being with someone who will say the actual thing. Do you want me to stop? She held his gaze. No, she said. Don’t stop. They sat with the residue of the argument for a while. the particular silence after two people have said difficult things and neither is wrong and neither is entirely right and they’re both still there which is its own kind of answer Lily’s play was on Thursday Victoria was in the third row when Lily came out in her costumeuma she was playing a tree with all the authority of someone who had decided

that playing a tree was an important artistic opportunity she scanned the audience the way children do the automatic radar sweep for their people. And when she found Victoria’s face, she did the small wave that was also a beam. The full-faced smile of a child who has been looked for and found. Victoria waved back.

Ethan watched this from the fourth row and felt something shift in his chest that he didn’t try to name. Spring came. The year turned in the way years do. Not all at once, but incrementally, the light changing before the temperature. The trees deciding to try again. The Princeton house got a new water pipe in the east wall and a garbage disposal that actually worked and a small raised bed that Lily had campaigned for since February.

And that Ethan had built on a Saturday in March while Victoria read case files on the porch and offered structural opinions that were occasionally useful and frequently off base. You’re holding the level wrong, Ethan said. I’m reading, not holding the level. You pointed at it. I was gesturing in its general direction from the porch.

I have thoughts about drainage, she said. Don’t you want to hear my thoughts about drainage? Not particularly. She told him anyway. One of the drainage thoughts turned out to be correct, which she noted. He noted that she’d noted it. Lily planted tomatoes, which she called my tomatoes, with a possessiveness that made clear they were not family tomatoes.

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