“That’s fair,” Caleb said. “I’ll take it.”
He said it gently, without triumph. The tone of a man closing a difficult chapter rather than winning an argument against his own mother.
She signed without further comment, handed the pen back. And left the office without saying goodbye to either of us.
I thought, walking out to the car that day, that I’d feel triumphant.
I mostly just felt tired. The particular exhaustion. That comes after finally setting down something you didn’t fully realize you’d been carrying.
Caleb reached for my hand in the parking lot, neither of us saying much on the drive home. The radio playing quietly in the background. While both of us processed eleven years compressed into one Tuesday afternoon. “It’s really over,” he said eventually, more to himself than to me. “It’s really over,” I agreed. Neither of us fully believed it yet, not completely, not until we walked back into our own kitchen and I noticed. For the first time in over a decade, how completely, uncomplicatedly ours it finally felt.
Deloris didn’t disappear from our lives completely after that.
She still called occasionally, stiff and careful at first. Gradually warming into something closer to normal conversation over the following months.
