“His mother, Paulette, passed away eighteen months ago,” Harlan said. “A heart attack, sudden, no real warning. I’d been managing Miles’s care alone for a year and a half by the time I met you at the gardening club, and some part of me was terrified that if I led with any of it, you’d see me as nothing but a man carrying an impossible situation instead of someone worth actually getting to know first.”
“Harlan,” my mother said, “I buried my own husband eleven years ago. I understand carrying something impossible.”
“I know that now,” he said. “I should have trusted you with it considerably sooner than I did. I kept telling myself I’d explain everything once things between us felt more solid. I think I just kept moving that line further away every week, because the explanation never got any easier to actually say out loud.”
“The money,” I said, finally speaking up. “In the briefcase.”
“Ferncrest’s insurance coverage runs out faster than the actual recovery timeline does,” Harlan said. “I cover the difference out of pocket every month, in cash, because their billing office prefers it that way for a program Miles is enrolled in outside standard insurance categories. Visiting hours end at eight sharp. It’s a twenty-minute drive from your house. I leave at 7:30 because that’s the absolute latest I can manage and still make it there with enough time to actually sit with him before they ask visitors to leave.”
“That’s why you go south,” Nadia said quietly. “Not north. Not home.”
“That’s why,” Harlan confirmed. “I live north of you, exactly like I said. Ferncrest is south. I’ve been splitting my evenings between two directions for eighteen months, and I let all of you believe, through nothing but my own silence, that the second direction was something far worse than the truth actually was.”
My mother invited him back for dinner the following Sunday, though this time the conversation started well before seven o’clock instead of ending abruptly around it.
“I want to meet him,” she told Harlan directly, once he’d finished a considerably more complete account of the past eighteen months than any version he’d offered across the previous six. “Miles. If that’s something he’d be comfortable with, and something you’d be comfortable with too.”
Harlan looked at her for a long moment, something shifting visibly behind his eyes. “I’d like that,” he said. “I think he would too, honestly. He asks about you sometimes, in his own way. I’ve mentioned you to him more than I ever let myself mention him to you.”
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