Chapter 20
"It's hard." She wrapped both hands around the mug.
"He's — it's been hard for him to understand why I think what happened was as serious as it was.
He keeps coming back to the fact that nobody went to jail, so it couldn't have been that bad." She looked up at me.
"I don't know how to explain to him that that isn't the point."
"What is the point, in your mind?" I asked.
She thought about it carefully.
I watched her think.
"That we took something from you that wasn't money," she said.
"We took your right to decide.
That house was yours.
The decision to sell it, to keep it, to do anything at all with it — that was only ever yours.
And we just — we moved around you.
Like you weren't the one it belonged to." She paused.
"Like you were an obstacle."
I let that sit between us.
"I've been thinking about Dad," she said quietly.
"About how much of him was in that house.
And I keep thinking about you driving up there that morning expecting to do this brave, hard thing, and walking in and finding—" She stopped.
"I'm sorry I was part of that.
I'm sorry I made that morning harder than it already was."
"It was a hard morning," I agreed.
"It was also clarifying."
She looked at me.
"Clarifying how?"
"I spent years keeping that house because it was the last place I felt close to your father.
And I think somewhere I confused the house with him.
Holding on to the property as though the property and the memory were the same thing." I looked toward the window.
"They aren't.
He's in the cedar beds.
He's in the way you think carefully before you speak.
He's in the cinnamon rolls from Fifth Street because he's the one who took you there the first time." I looked back at her.
"The house was just a house.
A beautiful one.
But just a house."
Madison's eyes were wet.
She didn't wipe them.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Honestly."
"I am," I said.
May you like
And I meant it without qualification, which was new.
"And you and me?"
