Formally.
Carefully.
With enough distance that every meeting remains a choice rather than an inherited obligation.
My mother never truly apologized in the way I once wanted. That fantasy died early. She prefers the language of regret without ownership. Things became unfortunate. Tensions escalated. Mistakes were made. Her sentences often arrive pre-softened, as though grammar itself might protect her from guilt.
My father is quieter now.
Age has made him smaller and, strangely, easier to read. I think the settlement wounded his identity more than the money did. He had spent his whole life imagining himself a principled patriarch. Being forced to see the record of what he enabled cracked something in that self-concept that may never fully mend.
Once, a year after everything ended, he said to me over lunch, “I think I thought being fair meant treating each child according to their strengths.”
I looked at him for a long time.
“And who decided my strength meant I deserved less?”
He had no answer.
That mattered too.
Not because silence heals.
Because some questions finally corner the right shame.
My mother still believes, I think, that I took everything too far.
My father no longer says so.