"She cried. Then she asked me whether I could come to her school presentation on Tuesday week. I had it on the calendar, but I nearly missed the date."
Daniel listened without interrupting.
"I have been telling myself that I'm doing everything for her," Catherine said. "But some of the things I've done for her have kept me from being with her. I can't get back the missed evenings just because I win the shareholder vote."
"No," he said. "But you can be there on Tuesday."
Catherine rubbed her forehead and gave a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so tired. "You make it sound simple."
"It isn't. Simple doesn't mean easy."
They stood beside the new gate for a moment while a breeze moved the leaves overhead. Then Catherine's phone began vibrating. She looked at it, winced at the name on the screen, and silenced the call. Her eyes filled with the kind of contained fury Daniel remembered from the hospital billing office.
"It's Richard's lawyer," she said. "They've added a statement about my emotional judgment. Apparently losing a company is enough to make a woman unfit to supervise a twelve-year-old girl's homework."
"Have you told your own lawyer?"
"Yes. Every document is being preserved. But I'm tired of being told to stay calm while other people write terrible things about me."
Daniel set his wrench on the plywood. "You don't have to be calm with me."
She stared at him. "Excuse me?"
"You're standing in your own yard. Lily's inside. You have a few minutes before she comes looking for you. If you're angry, be angry. I won't tell anybody you lost control."
Catherine's jaw moved once. Then she began speaking, and the words came with a force she had apparently been holding down for days. She talked about investors who had called her visionary when they wanted access to her contacts and difficult when she challenged their assumptions. She talked about the nights she had carried Lily through a fever while answering client emails with one hand. She talked about how Richard could miss appointments and be described as busy, while she could miss one and find the lapse listed as evidence of maternal neglect.
She did not shout indiscriminately. Her anger was precise, full of names, dates, and details, and it became more painful rather than less as she spoke. Daniel stood quietly, neither correcting nor congratulating her. He knew that a person sometimes needed to hear their own anger all the way to its end before deciding what to do with it. When Catherine stopped, the garden seemed unusually still.
"I didn't mean to unload all that on you," she said.
"You asked if I could hold a fence post yesterday. I think I can stand here while you tell the truth."
"Does it help?"
"It helps me when someone listens. You tell me."
"A little," she admitted. "More than a little, actually."