My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house I bought with my own money and told me she and my father were moving in the next day, that they were taking the master suite, that her daughter would get the best ocean-view room

My father moved back into Del Mar after the property issue resolved, alone this time, with a part-time estate manager and explicit legal instructions that nobody handles his signatures but him. We have dinner every other Sunday. Some evenings are easy. Some are still threaded with old absences. Repair at this age is not dramatic. It is often just consistency after a long period of distortion. He asks more questions now. About my work. About my plans. About my mother, sometimes, which hurts and helps at once. Once, while leaving after dinner, he paused by the terrace doors and said, “Your mother would have loved this house.” And because I no longer needed him to say it at exactly the right time to count, I simply said, “I know.”

Sometimes I think of Vanessa in whatever smaller place she found after the gala, maybe still turning her face toward flattering light, maybe still insisting the wound is mutual, maybe still believing that if a lie was lived elegantly enough it ought to earn partial truth as reward. I do not spend much time there. She had enough of my life already.