He looked at her for a moment with an expression she recognized from childhood, from the difficult years of it, from the times when her father had watched her navigate something painful and wanted to make it disappear and instead held his hands at his sides because she had asked him to let her handle it. He had always been, despite everything, a man who respected what she asked of him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to handle this alone.”
She shook her head. “You were right to come.”
She looked at Ethan one final time. Not with anger—the anger had burned out weeks ago, in the small hours of various mornings, and what remained was something cleaner and cooler. Not with pain either. With clarity. The specific clarity that comes when you stop asking what you should have done differently and start understanding that you were always exactly who you were, and the problem was never that.
She crossed the short distance between herself and the mahogany table and picked up the black credit card—the one Ethan had slid toward her with such easy condescension—and she held it for a moment, feeling its weight, and then she placed it on the table in front of him.