Diane had a way of cutting through everything ornamental and arriving at the center of something with a single sentence.
We talked for an hour—not about the incident, not about the specific mechanics of what Helen had done or what Jeffrey McMaster had called out or what the room had looked like when it rose.
We talked about the pattern beneath it.
Seven years of it. The way it accumulates. The specific, particular weight of being dismissed in spaces where your competence is not actually in question, where the people around you see exactly who you are and treat you accordingly.
And the one person who refuses to see it happens to be sitting at your holiday table.
Diane asked whether Frank was beginning to understand the full scope.
I said, “I thought he might be, for the first time.”
She nodded. She did not offer advice, which is one of the things I value most about her. She simply let the conversation be what it needed to be: two women who understood each other’s world sitting in a closed office and acknowledging that the personal costs of service do not always come from the service itself.
Sometimes they come from the people who never bothered to understand what service means.