“She is proud of it,” I said. “She should be proud of it. If you find it embarrassing, that is a problem you will need to resolve, because it is who she is.”
He nodded.
“I’m working on it,” he said.
I looked at him for a long moment, this man my daughter had chosen, and I thought about what I could and could not know about a person from a series of difficult weeks. I thought about what Samantha had said about his certainty, and I thought about the difference between certainty that has never been challenged and certainty that has been examined and revised. I thought about Richard, who had been wrong about things and had changed his mind about them, and about how that willingness had been, in the long sum of things, one of the most important facts about him.
Greg was not Richard.
He was thirty-four and sitting across from me on a porch that overlooked a vineyard worth considerably more than he had apparently understood, and he had come here alone to say he was wrong without an attorney and without Samantha beside him, and that was something.
