We’d only gotten silence.
When I finally lowered my hand, I realized something. The anger I’d carried for two decades was gone. Not because the past had changed, but because it finally made sense.
Jack spoke quietly. “You know what’s funny?
“What?”
“I spent years being angry at you.”
I laughed softly. “Good.”
“Good?”
“I spent years being angry at you, too.”
For the first time, we were laughing about the same thing.
The conversation lasted almost three hours. Long enough to fill in some gaps, long enough to compare memories, long enough to realize how much life had happened while we weren’t looking. Neither of us tried to rewrite history. Neither of us pretended that things would have been perfect.
Maybe they wouldn’t have. Maybe they would have. There was no way to know.
And strangely, for the first time, I didn’t need to know.
