PART 16:

She said no, not because she wanted distance from him, but because it needed to be her in her mother’s house without backup or buffer, saying the things she’d been carrying for years. She left at 9:00 in the morning, and Ethan spent the day with Ka, who had a soccer game in Riverside Park that she played with the complete physical abandon of someone who had not yet developed self-consciousness about public failure.

She fell twice, scored once, and was briefly in a conflict with a teammate named Henry over whether a throwin had been done correctly. Ethan watched all of it from the sideline with his mother, who had come because she always came to Kora’s games, and because she had excellent radar for when her son needed company without knowing how to ask for it.

She went to see her mother, his mother said. Not a question. Yeah. Alone. She needed to do it alone. His mother, whose name was Patricia, and who had strong opinions about most things and kept most of them to herself until the moment she decided not to, said, “She sounds like someone who’s spent a long time doing hard things alone.

” “She is, and you’re letting her. It’s not my place to I didn’t say stop her,” his mother said. “I said you’re letting her. That’s different. Most men would have insisted on going.” She watched Kora chase the ball toward the goal with complete single-minded commitment. She’s lucky you know the difference.

He didn’t respond to that, but he thought about it for the rest of the game. Victoria texted at 2:15. Still here? It’s long. Are you okay? He texted back. Kora scored. I’m fine. Take the time you need. At 4:40, she texted driving back. Can we talk tonight? I’ll be here. She came back at 6:30, coat damp from rain she’d driven through.

and she came in and put her bag down and sat on the couch and he came out of the kitchen and looked at her. She looked like someone who had gone somewhere and done something difficult and was now in the exact place she needed to be afterward. “How did it go?” he asked. “Long,” she said. “Hard, honest.” She pulled the rubber band from her ponytail and her hair fell down and she rubbed the back of her neck. She cried.

Your mother? My mother doesn’t cry easily. She cried. Victoria looked at the lamp. I told her everything specifically. Not the version I’d been giving her. The careful version that protected her from having to hear too much. The actual version. She paused. About the way he talked to me in private versus in public.

About what it felt like to check his face before I said things. About coming to her in year 1 and her saying that all relationships had friction. That I was possibly too sensitive. That Marcus was clearly devoted. What did she say? She said Victoria exhaled. She said she’d thought I was too in my head, that I intellectualized my feelings and sometimes the analysis was the problem.

A pause, which is there might be some truth to that in general, but in this case, it was wrong. She’d made her picture of who I am, and she’d looked at my account of my own relationship through that picture, and it had distorted everything. He waited and then she said she was sorry. Victoria looked at him and this time it was different from the party.

At the party it was she was managing the evening. Today she’d sat with me for 4 hours and heard things she couldn’t unhear and she looked small actually smaller than I’ve ever seen her. She said she was sorry and she meant the whole weight of it. Do you believe her? He asked a pause. Yes, she said. and I’m still angry. Both things.

She looked at her hands. She asked about you. He raised an eyebrow. She said a slight complicated smile moved across her face. She said that she’d thought about what you said at the party, that she takes care of herself, and that she’d turned it over for 3 weeks and decided it was one of the truest things anyone had said about me in a long time.

She paused. She wants to meet you properly, not at an event. dinner at her house. He absorbed that. What did you say? I said I’d ask you then. Yes. She looked at him. It won’t be easy. It doesn’t have to be easy. She can be a lot, Victoria said. I say that with full awareness that I am also apparently a lot. You’re not a lot, he said.

You’re specific. That’s different. She studied him for a moment. You’re going to stop me from being self-deprecating, aren’t you? Every time. She looked at him for another moment, and something in her expression moved in the way that it did when he’d said something that got through the perimeter, and she didn’t recover it this time.

She just let it be there. Marcus called her. Victoria said after the Sunday dinner, after I left, he called her and told her he was concerned about me, that I’d seemed unstable at the party, that the new relationship looked impulsive, that he hoped she was keeping an eye on things. She said it without heat, just laying out the facts.

She told him not to contact her again. Ethan sat down in the armchair. She told him that. She said, and I’ll remember this exactly. She said, “I’ve allowed my daughter’s experience to be filtered through your account for too long, and I don’t intend to continue.” Victoria said the words with a precision that meant she’d replayed them several times on the drive back. She called him the next day.

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