Some visits held small moments of laughter; others were tense and quiet.
Sometimes Emmett barely spoke.
Sometimes Etta hid behind Harriet before saying hello.
But Weston stopped demanding immediate affection and put everything into the one thing he could control: showing up.
One Thursday in November he called two hours early to say an emergency hearing had run late, and Harriet felt the old flash of anger.
“Tell Emmett yourself,” she said, and handed her son the phone.
Weston explained the delay with no dramatic excuses.
Emmett listened.
“Next time, don’t make promises you can’t keep,” the boy said, and hung up.
Weston arrived late that evening anyway — but he brought dinner, and sat in the kitchen until Emmett finished his homework, and they played one game of chess.
When he left, Emmett didn’t offer a warm goodbye.
But he left his bedroom door cracked open.
That was the rhythm of it, month after month, and Harriet came to understand that this — the tedious, unglamorous, undramatic accumulation of showing up — was what rebuilding actually looked like, and that it looked like almost nothing at all.
There was no grand reconciliation scene, no tearful embrace that fixed everything, no single moment where the wound closed.