Chapter Twenty-Five
Diane came to the house on a Sunday, unannounced, while Elias was at his supervised visit and Jess was out running errands, and I almost didn’t open the door.
I opened it anyway. I was tired of people making decisions about this story without me in the room.
?
She looked smaller than she had at the dialysis center. Older. The interview three days earlier had cost her something too, I realized—the particular exhaustion of a woman who had spent her fury and found it hadn’t purchased what she wanted.
“I’m not here to fight,” she said. “Mara made me come.”
“Made you.”
“She said if I didn’t apologize to you directly, she’d stop speaking to me. She’s stubborn. She gets it from her father.” A ghost of something almost fond crossed her face. “I don’t have a lot of people left willing to threaten me into better behavior. I’d like to keep the one I have.”
?
I let her in. I made tea, which felt absurd, making tea for a woman who had tried to burn my marriage down for a headline, but Ruth had raised me right by proxy, apparently, and some habits outlast their reasons.
“I posted that photograph,” Diane said, “because I wanted the world to see my daughter as something other than a dying woman in a hospital bed. I wanted one picture of her looking loved instead of looking sick.”
?
“You could have asked me to be in it,” I said. “I love her too, in whatever strange way you love someone whose crisis reshaped your entire year. I’d have stood in that photograph if you’d asked.”
Diane looked at me for a long moment, and something in her face cracked slightly, the way old paint cracks, not dramatically, just enough to see what’s underneath.
“I didn’t think of that,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure I’ve thought of very much, these past two years, except keeping her alive.”
?
We didn’t become friends that afternoon. I want to be honest about that too, because this story has enough tidy reconciliations already, and I don’t want to invent one that isn’t true.
But she apologized, plainly, without excuses, and I accepted it, plainly, without absolution, and when she left, she paused at the door.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “he never once, in eight years, stopped talking about the wife he hadn’t met yet. Before you existed to him, Mrs. Hale, he was already loyal to you. I hated him for it. I think I still do, a little. But it’s true.”