That surprised him.
Then he smiled.
“I probably will.”
Gregory wrote me a letter.
Not an email.
A letter.
Three pages handwritten.
He admitted he had blurred the line between protecting a client and directing a client.
He acknowledged that his prior advice to Daniel created a conflict he should have disclosed immediately.
He apologized without excuses.
I did not respond for two weeks.
Then I invited him for coffee.
We did not repair twenty-three years of friendship in an afternoon.
We did not try.
Forgiveness, I discovered, was not a door that opened once.
It was more like a hallway.
You walked through it gradually.
Sometimes you stopped.
Sometimes you turned around.
Sometimes you needed to sit down before continuing.
But if both people kept moving, distance changed.
Vanessa proved more complicated.
After the hearing, she remained my medical advocate.
That meant she attended appointments.
Which meant she resumed doing something she had perfected during our marriage.
