“You were young,” I said. “We both were. I don’t think either of us knew enough back then to ask the right questions.”
“We know now,” he said.
“We know now,” I agreed.
Milo and Dahlia noticed the change too, in their own quiet way.
Dahlia asked me once, a few months later, why Grandma Deloris seemed different lately.
We were driving home from school, just the two of us. The kind of casual car conversation where kids sometimes say the most perceptive things almost by accident. “She used to just walk in and start rearranging things,” Dahlia said. “Now she asks. It’s weird. But a good weird.”
“Different how?” I asked her.
“Nicer,” Dahlia said. “She asked before she used my markers last time. She never used to ask.”
I smiled at that. Struck by how a child’s small observation could capture something I’d spent months trying to put into words myself. “Did something happen?” Dahlia asked, perceptive in the way eleven-year-olds sometimes surprise you with.
“Something happened,” I said. “It’s a grown-up thing. But yes.”
I kept the folder from that first confrontation in a drawer of my own now. Alongside our current, correct deed, the one with only Caleb’s name and mine listed as owners.
