PART 14:

He didn’t argue with that. She was right and she needed to be right out loud. She said at the party it was different. Victoria continued that she understood and she went home and she called him. A pause. I don’t know if she’ll ever actually She stopped. I don’t know if her version of who I am will ever match my actual experience of being me.

And I’m tired, Ethan. I’m so tired of making the case. He looked out at the river. The water was gray and moving in the October wind, flat and purposeful. Going somewhere it was always going. You don’t have to make the case, he said. She’s my mother. I know. I want her to understand. I’ve wanted it.

Her voice caught just barely, but it caught and he heard it and didn’t look at her because she didn’t want to be watched when that happened. I’ve been trying to be understandable to her my whole life. I know, he said again. They sat for a while. A jogger went past. A dog stopped near the bench to investigate something and its owner pulled it away with an apology.

The river kept moving. You can be angry, he said. I am angry. Okay. And I’m sad both. She exhaled. I keep thinking. She stopped. What? I keep thinking that I did everything right. I got out of a bad relationship. I rebuilt. I did the work. I moved to a new city. I got a good apartment. I She gestured vaguely at the air.

I did what you’re supposed to do. And he’s still somehow he’s still in my living room. He’s not in your living room. He’s in my mother’s. That’s different, is it? He turned to look at her. She was staring at the water, jaw set, eyes bright with something she was not going to let become tears in public. Yes, he said. It is.

He doesn’t have access to you. He’s working through everyone around you because he doesn’t have direct access anymore. That’s not power. That’s the last move of someone who’s out of moves. She looked at him. He went through your assistant, Ethan said. He called me. He showed up at a family dinner he hadn’t been invited to by you.

Those aren’t the moves of someone in control of a situation. Those are the moves of someone who has lost it and is trying to find a way back in. He held her gaze. He’s lost. You’re just not out of his way yet. She looked at him for a long moment. Something in her expression moved. Not relief exactly, but the specific shift of someone who has been carrying a weight at the wrong angle and has just been shown how to rebalance it.

You make it sound almost manageable, she said. It is manageable. Not today, maybe, but it is. She looked back at the river. My mother is a separate problem. One thing at a time, she was quiet. Then I need to tell her, really tell her. not in a hotel ballroom where everyone is watching and being polite.

I need to sit down with her and explain what two years with that man actually cost me and she’s either going to hear it or she isn’t.” “Yes,” he said. “And if she isn’t, then you know,” he said, “and you stop spending yourself on the case.” She nodded slowly. He could see her thinking through it, the actual shape of what it would mean to stop expecting her mother to understand her.

the grief in that and the strange relief. “Stay here for a minute,” he said. She looked at him. “Just it’s a Sunday morning. It’s a nice bench. Stay here for a minute.” He leaned back on the bench. “You don’t have to do anything about any of this right now.” After a moment, she leaned back, too. They sat on the bench for nearly an hour. The river kept moving.

They talked a little. Not about Marcus, not about her mother, about easier things, smaller things. She told him about a meeting she had Monday that she was mildly dreading. He told her about Kora’s argument with the math worksheet. She told him she’d been thinking about getting a plant to keep her orchid company, then immediately second-guessed it.

He said one plant was fine and two was also fine and it didn’t need to be a decision. She laughed at that. Really laughed. The real one, the short, genuine one. He turned to look at her when she laughed, and she was already looking at him, and neither of them looked away for a moment. There on a park bench on Riverside Drive, with the Hudson behind them, and the city going about its Sunday morning around them, and October doing its thing with the light.

Something settled. Not resolved. Nothing was resolved, but settled, like furniture rearranging in a way that finally made sense of the space. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I was just at Home Depot.” Ethan, I know, he said. I know. She looked at him for another moment. Then she said quietly in the way she said real things carefully without decoration.

I think I’m falling in love with you. He heard it land. Every word of it with its weight and its risk and the specific courage it had taken her to say it out loud to someone she was still learning to trust. He thought about Dana. He thought about four years of keeping the world small and navigable.

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