“I am working on it.”
“I know.”
She did not ask whether she was forgiven.
That helped me forgive her more than the question would have.
When she left, she paused at the door.
“Call me if you need anything.”
The old sentence might once have sounded like an offer to take over.
This time she added, “Or don’t. You get to decide.”
I smiled.
“Good night, Lauren.”
After she drove away, I walked into the garden.
The fountain caught the porch light in broken pieces. I thought of James insisting on building it, of me warning him about mosquitoes, of the day the landscapers removed it after his funeral because I could not bear one more thing that required maintenance.
Now the water was back because I had chosen it.
That difference seemed to contain the whole year.
I slipped James’s card into my pocket and sat on the edge of the fountain.
For a long time, I listened to the water.
No one was speaking for me.
No one was protecting me from a life I was still perfectly capable of living.
And somewhere inside the legal language James had left behind, beneath signatures and accounts and careful safeguards, his simplest instruction remained exactly where he had put it.
Ask Eleanor.
