"Vanessa and I are separated," he told me, barely five minutes into that first conversation. "Not because of the house, not directly. Once everything came apart, I think I finally saw clearly how much of this whole plan actually came from her, and how much of my own complicity came from just not wanting to disappoint her."
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"I'm sorry to hear that," I said, and found, saying it, that I mostly meant it, even after everything.
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"I don't expect you to just move past this," Preston said. "I know I don't get the house back. I know I probably don't deserve the kind of trust I used to have with you either, not right away."
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"No," I agreed. "You don't. Not right away."
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We started meeting for coffee every few weeks after that, careful and considerably slower than either of us probably wanted, Preston working through genuine therapy alongside it, something he mentioned almost sheepishly the third time we met, like he expected me to be surprised he'd actually sought it out on his own.
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It's been fourteen months now since that afternoon I watched him force open a door to an empty house from a parked truck across the street. We're not fully repaired, not in the way we were before Walter passed, before the comments about stairs and taxes and being realistic started quietly reshaping how my own son saw me.
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But he comes to the lake house now, every few weeks, and last month he finally asked, carefully, whether I'd consider showing him the garden I'd been slowly building along the side fence.
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I did. And for the first time in almost two years, standing there together looking at nothing more complicated than a row of tomato plants, it felt like he was actually seeing me again, instead of simply calculating what I might eventually cost him.
