Sarah was there that weekend too, and we sat on the deck later with drinks while the lake darkened around us. Derek is still at his parents’ place, she told me. Forty one now. Still working at their firm. Makes forty eight thousand. Pays child support. Sees Tyler twice a month. Dating someone from church. Drives a 2009 Honda Civic your parents helped him buy. She paused. He’s smaller now, she said. Physically, I asked. No, she said. Just diminished. Does he still blame me, I asked. Probably, she said. But he doesn’t talk about it much anymore. I felt no satisfaction hearing that, and no pity either. Just a kind of quiet awareness. Derek had become ordinary. And his particular ego had never been built to survive ordinary.
Clare texted me monthly by then. She’d been promoted at work. Her apartment was modest but clean. Tyler was doing better in school, fewer incidents, weekly therapy, guitar practice thirty minutes every day. Clare was in therapy herself too, individual sessions and family sessions alongside Tyler. She was dating someone new, an elementary school teacher named Tim, stable and healthy by all accounts. She’d taken financial literacy classes, sold her wedding ring, started paying down debt one careful payment at a time. Her most recent message stayed with me longer than the others. I’m not asking for forgiveness anymore, she wrote. I just want you to know I’m trying to be better. Tyler asks about you. Says you’re teaching him guitar through the videos you sent. Thank you for not abandoning him the way I abandoned you.
