Whether it was enough I could not yet know.
What I could know was what I was willing to extend, which was not forgiveness, not yet, not the complete and settled thing, but something like the conditions under which forgiveness becomes possible. A door left open. Time as the necessary element.
“The wedding,” I said. “If you still want to hold it here, I will still host it. With the conditions that were always part of that agreement.”
He looked at me.
“That I am present,” I said. “That I am Samantha’s mother in that room and in the photographs and in the family you are building. Not a problem to be managed or a guest to be accommodated. Her mother.”
“Yes,” he said. Without pause. “Yes.”
The wedding happened on a Saturday two weeks later, smaller than originally planned because there was not time to reassemble the full original guest list and because Samantha said, when we talked about it, that she found she wanted something quieter than she had originally planned. Sixty people instead of two hundred. The same rose garden. A shorter rental setup. Wine from the vineyard, which Ben and I selected from the August vintage that had been aging in the cellar.
