Ava read the letter. I could not stop her. She read it twice and then folded it in half and said, “She wasn’t there,” and threw it away, and I think that girl is going to be more solid at thirty than I have ever been.
Dr. Pell now takes Ava on Mondays as well as Thursdays, on Daniel’s insurance, in her own name, forty minutes away in Brantham where nobody in that family goes.
Daniel and I are not together.
I want to be careful here, because people always expect this part to be either a reconciliation or a scorching, and it was neither.
He apologized. Properly, over months, in a way that cost him something. He went to his own counselor. He stopped saying I just reacted and started saying I chose her version because it was faster. He said, one night in October, the truest thing he has ever said to me:
“I didn’t take her side. I took the side that let me go back to the grill.”
I believe him. I even like him, most days, which surprises me.
But I sat in that yard and asked him one question in front of twenty-six people — you believe I would shove your daughter — and he said nothing, and there is a kind of silence you can explain and still not survive.
