Chapter 6 - The Restaurant
On January 15th I agreed to meet Trevor once. A restaurant I picked — public, neutral, nothing sentimental about it.
He came alone.
He looked like he hadn't slept properly in two weeks, which was probably true. He sat down across from me and for a long moment just looked at the table between us.
Then he said, "I didn't know about the account."
I looked at him.
"The one with Camille's mother. I didn't know she was moving anything there. I need you to know that."
I studied him. My son. Forty-two years old, worn down, sitting across from me in a booth in January, telling me he hadn't known.
"Whether you knew or you didn't," I said, "you still shut that door in my face."
He looked up.
"You looked your own son in the eye and told him strangers lived at his grandmother's house. Then you called me — from a room full of people, because you wanted them to hear it — to tell me my money couldn't buy me a place in your life. Camille wasn't holding that phone, Trevor. You were. That was your voice. That was your choice."
He didn't argue.
He just sat with it. That surprised me more than almost anything else that had happened.
Finally he said, "I think somewhere along the way I stopped seeing you as a person. You were just always there. Always handling things. And I let myself decide that meant you were fine."
"I wasn't fine," I said. "I was a woman eating Christmas dinner by herself because her son told her she had the wrong house."
He closed his eyes.
We sat in that restaurant for two hours. We didn't resolve anything, because some things don't get resolved over one meal. But something got said that had needed saying for a very long time, and that mattered to me on its own, separate from everything else.
I did not turn the transfers back on.
May you like
I did not pretend the door hadn't closed.
But I walked out of that restaurant knowing exactly who I was and exactly what I was and wasn't willing to accept from here on out. That was more than I'd walked in with.
