Chapter 11 — The Long Night

We stayed up late that night, later than we had since we were teenagers, and we talked the way you can only talk to the one other person who was there.

We talked about the good things, which I had forgotten there were so many of — the treehouse, the sprinkler summers, the Sunday drives, our father’s terrible singing, our mother’s Christmas cookies that no one has ever been able to replicate because she never wrote the recipe down and now never will.

And we talked about the hard things, the real ones, without flinching for the first time in our lives: his resentment, my wound, the years we’d each spent building a version of the other that was easier to be angry at than to miss.