“You don’t need to buy your way into this kitchen.”
“I know. You shouldn’t have to pay for what we did either.”
We left the paper between us.
Finally, I asked the question I had been carrying since the foyer.
“Was it every time I mentioned him?”
Alex swallowed.
“No.”
“Because I can’t spend the rest of my life checking your face before I say your father’s name.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
He looked down at his hands.
“When you cried, I felt like I was supposed to help. I couldn’t. So I started dreading it.”
“Sometimes I was remembering something happy.”
“I know that now.”
“Sometimes I just needed you to remember with me.”
He pressed his thumb into the grain of the table.
“I miss him too. I kept thinking if we could have one normal holiday, maybe I wouldn’t feel it so much.”
I let him finish.
“Harper offered an easier version,” he said. “And I let myself believe it.”
There was no excuse hidden in the sentence. That helped more than any promise would have.
“You can tell me when you’re having a hard time,” I said. “You cannot disappear and leave someone else to decide whether I belong.”
He nodded, eyes wet.
For the first time since Peter died, we sat together and admitted neither of us knew how to do this.
Harper asked to come two days later.
I agreed to one hour, with Alex present. She arrived carrying a folder instead of the large handbag she usually set on my console.
Inside was a signed repayment schedule and records of what she had already returned.
“I’ve arranged to sell some things,” she said. “The card purchases.”
Alex checked the pages without speaking.
Then Harper looked at me.
“I was angry that you could keep saying yes.”
I waited.
“I had debt I didn’t want Alex to know about. You paid for something, and everyone thanked you. I felt smaller every time.”
“So you kept asking?”
Her face tightened.
“Yes.”
“And then removed me.”
“Yes.”
The word sounded different without an explanation attached.
She rubbed at a mark on the folder.
“I thought if you weren’t there, we could have one holiday that felt like ours.”
