PART 11
We reached out to Vivian three weeks later, a careful, tentative email through the address Mrs. Delacroix provided, Jasper writing most of it himself while I read over his shoulder, both of us revising it more times than either of us wanted to admit.
Vivian responded within a single day, a long, careful message that read considerably like the letter had — honest, unguarded, clearly the product of eighteen years of therapy rather than eighteen years of avoidance.
She flew out to meet us six weeks after that, a visit that started, understandably, with more silence than conversation, the three of us sitting in a coffee shop halfway between her current home and ours, working through eighteen years in careful, incomplete pieces neither of us fully expected to resolve in a single afternoon.
PART 12
“I’m not asking to be his mother again, in the way I would have been if none of this had happened,” Vivian told me, near the end of that first visit, once Jasper had stepped away to the counter for a refill. “I understand that role, at this point, genuinely belongs to you, and to Odile, in whatever shape the two of you built it into over eighteen years. I’m asking for whatever smaller, more honest version of a relationship with him is actually possible now, starting from exactly where we all are, instead of where we might have been.”
“I spent eighteen years hating you,” I told her honestly. “I need you to understand that clearly, before we go any further than this conversation. I don’t know yet how much of that hatred survives learning the truth. I know it’s already considerably less than it was three weeks ago.”
“That’s more than I let myself hope for,” Vivian said. “For a long time, honestly, more than I believed I deserved to hope for at all.”
