Chapter 6
Olivia was looking at the page. Not at me. At the page. Then at Marcus. Then back at the page. Then at me, finally, with the expression of someone who has just understood that the conversation they were certain they were going to have is not the conversation that is happening.
"No," she said, very quietly.
I looked at her for a moment. I thought about eleven days in a hospice room. I thought about Wednesday lunches and the weight of a teacup being set down on a table. I thought about three years of sitting across from her at holiday dinners while she described Marcus's most recent ruling and my father asked if I was still doing that finance thing and my mother looked toward the window with the particular patience of a woman waiting for something better to arrive.
I thought about my grandmother watching all of it from her end of the table with the stillness of someone who has already decided.
"Grandma knew exactly who to trust," I said.
Nobody spoke.
The rain ran down the glass.
Jonathan closed the folder.
The meeting concluded twenty-two minutes later with the specific efficiency of a room that has run out of moves. Marcus and Olivia did not leave together in the way they had arrived together. They left in the sequence of people who have a conversation to have in private that they are not ready to begin in public. My mother paused at the door and looked at me for a long moment with an expression I did not have a clean word for, something between apology and revision, the face of a woman who has been carrying a version of her daughter for thirty-two years and is beginning to understand that the version was hers and not mine.
She said my name.
May you like
I said I would call her next week.
She nodded and followed my father out, and then the conference room was empty except for me and David and Patricia and the folder on the table and the rain against the glass.
