What I actually did was knock on her door twice more in the following two weeks, once with Mark alongside me, and have the kind of civil but entirely ineffective conversations that people have when they are trying to be reasonable with someone who has decided that being reasonable is for people who lack conviction. Denise was not unkind during these conversations, exactly. She listened. She said things like “I hear what you’re saying” and “I’ll try to be more mindful.” She did not change her behavior in any measurable way.
Mark also spoke to her on his own, I discovered later, a couple of weeks into all of this. He hadn’t told me because he thought it hadn’t come to anything and didn’t want to make things feel more complicated than they were. Mark is the kind of person who believes things can be managed quietly if you approach them with enough goodwill. This is a quality I genuinely love about him, and in this particular situation it had not worked.
