She laughed and reached across the table for my hand. The moment struck me because I'd once been told that caring about practical details meant I wasn't capable of romance. Here we were, comparing figures and making jokes, and neither of us seemed to think the conversation diminished anything between us. I thought of the ring Minerva had flashed over dinner and wondered how different my life might have been if I had learned sooner that love could coexist with ordinary accountability.
Sometimes people ask whether I ever received a sincere apology from Minerva. Not directly. Through counsel, there were concessions about particular facts in legal filings, and Doris passed along a general message that her daughter was trying to change. I never asked her to deliver it. I didn't need Minerva to say she was sorry before I could consider myself free, and I didn't want to reopen contact merely to decide whether an apology was good enough.
I do hope she changed. That is not the same as wanting her back. I hope she found work that made her proud, learned to sustain friendships that weren't built on obligation, and discovered that another person can love her without being required to pay for every consequence of her decisions. I hope Landon learned something useful about honesty before proposing to someone again. I hope Doris and Billie found a way to care about Minerva without allowing every crisis to determine the shape of their lives.
None of those hopes requires me to monitor the results. I had to practice that sentence until it felt true. During the worst weeks, I was almost addicted to the idea that somebody would call and tell me a new story about how badly things were going for her. Each update seemed to confirm I had been right. But every update also placed her back in the center of my attention, and the attention was costing me more than any remaining argument could be worth.
By the first anniversary of that Thursday dinner, the dining room looked different. Not dramatically. I had replaced the heavy curtains with lighter ones, moved the little bookshelf closer to the window, and bought plates I liked without needing to justify the choice. The candles were still in a drawer. The table was the same table. The house had not become a stranger's place; it had become mine again.
That evening Rebecca came over with a bag of groceries. She wanted to try making pasta from scratch, which sounded ambitious given our respective cooking abilities. We flourished the counter, watched a video, and produced a quantity of dough that seemed committed to sticking to everything except itself. We laughed, started again, and eventually made a meal that was only slightly lopsided. Then Rebecca opened a grocery bag and pulled out a carton of tiramisu.
I looked at it and stopped. She saw my expression immediately. "Too much?" she asked.