Not every day — we are not going to pretend to be people we never were — but really, on the phone, on Sundays, the way you talk to someone who knows the whole of you.

He came out west in the spring and I showed him my life, the one my family never saw, and he liked it, and he liked me, I think, which after forty-five years of being related to someone is its own strange gift.

We are planning to take our kids — his two, and I have decided at forty-five that I am not too old to matter to my niece and nephew — to the lake our parents used to take us to, this summer, so that the next set of children in this family will have at least one memory of the two of us together and happy, to set against whatever they inherit.

Because that is the thing I understand now, that I did not understand driving up to that house in November with a nine-year silence in my chest.