Evelyn listened to that too.
She attended Noah’s appointments without controlling the conversation.
Sometimes he allowed her inside.
Sometimes he asked her to wait in the hallway.
She waited.
One afternoon, Noah brought Rebecca’s shoes to her apartment.
“I don’t want to hear them walking around Dad’s place anymore,” he said.
Evelyn accepted the box.
“What do you want me to do with them?”
“Keep them.”
She placed the shoes inside a larger box beside a photograph of Rebecca smiling beside Lake Michigan.
Then she looked at her son and finally spoke the words she should have given him five years earlier.
“You were never responsible for surviving.”
Noah closed his eyes.
“The accident was not your fault,” Evelyn continued. “Rebecca’s death was not your fault. You were a fourteen-year-old child who survived something terrible.”
He did not embrace her.
He did not say that he forgave her.
But he did not pull away when Evelyn took his hand.
