"I'll take them," I said. "But I might not read them all at once."
"That's fine."
We sat beside each other for a while, listening to Leah talking with someone on the phone in the kitchen. Dad asked about work. I told him I was still handling contracts and that I might volunteer to teach financial literacy at a community program in the spring. He asked what had happened with the wedding, and I told him Rachel and I were separating.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It's complicated."
"Most things that hurt are."
I almost laughed. He had not been a particularly philosophical man when I was growing up. Then I remembered that sobriety had given him years in which he could no longer hide from his own thoughts by drinking them away. Perhaps a person can become someone different without becoming someone innocent.
"She tried to control things because she was afraid," I told him. "And I kept thinking if I stayed calm enough, she'd stop being afraid."
Dad looked down at his hands. "That's something I recognize. Your mother used to get so careful around me. She thought if she said everything the right way, I wouldn't disappear for three days. I let her believe she could prevent my choices. That wasn't fair."
I had never heard him say that. I thought of my mother working in our kitchen late at night, calculating what we'd have for dinner, smoothing over excuses until the excuses took up more space than the truth. She had died several years earlier, after building a peaceful second half of her life far from Dad's chaos. I used to feel disloyal to her whenever I considered reconnecting with him. Now I wondered whether she'd have wanted me to carry that guilt forever.
"You don't have to hate someone to protect yourself from them," Dad said.
I looked at him. "Did you learn that in a meeting?"
He smiled. "Probably. I borrowed a lot of good sentences from people who'd already made my mistakes."
When I left, he didn't ask when I'd return. He stood in the doorway while I carried the wooden box to the car. Leah was waiting beside it with two travel mugs of coffee. She handed me one, looked at the box, and smiled.
"He finally gave you those," she said.
"You knew about them?"
"He asked me once whether he should send them. I told him I wasn't going to decide for you. He didn't like that answer then."
"He's getting used to it."
"We're all trying."
On the drive home, I thought about the strange symmetry between the two boxes now in my life. At the apartment, four cardboard boxes represented a relationship I was ending because it had grown too controlling. On the passenger seat beside me, a wooden box represented a relationship I might begin again because someone had finally stopped demanding that I accept his version of the past. Neither box could decide what happened next. I could.
The following week, a mutual friend named Cassie Blake sent me a message asking whether I'd lost my mind. Cassie had been close to Rachel since graduate school. She was loyal, funny, and absolutely convinced that loyalty required taking the strongest possible position before hearing both sides.