Then the attached statement.
His expression changed.
“They were contacted?” he asked me.
I nodded.
My mother’s voice sharpened.
“You cannot understand what was happening in our family at the time.”
Sigard straightened.
“Then tell me.”
She looked surprised.
For twenty years, she had possessed every opportunity to tell me.
Now, because the person asking wore a doctor’s badge and had appeared in the newspaper, she seemed to believe she deserved an audience.
“Your mother was very difficult then,” she said carefully.
There it was.
The old story.
The version in which a seventeen-year-old somehow forced two adults to place a suitcase beside the door.
My father jumped in.
“We had rules.
Olivia refused to respect them.
Things escalated.”
I said nothing.
Sigard looked at me, perhaps expecting me to defend myself.
I didn’t.
I had spent too many years learning that some lies expose themselves if you let the person telling them continue.
My mother mistook my silence for weakness.
“We believed distance would teach her responsibility,” she said.
Sigard glanced down at the document again.
“Three nights outside?”
My mother’s lips parted.
My father looked at me.
“You told him that?”
The question almost made me laugh.
Not because anything was funny, but because even now his first concern was not that I had spent those nights outside.
It was that Sigard knew.
“Yes,” I said.
My father’s face hardened.
“That was not supposed to become some permanent accusation against us.”
Lance spoke quietly.
“The permanent part appears to be your signatures.”
A nurse passing behind the reception desk slowed for half a second before continuing.
My mother noticed.
Her entire posture changed.
“Can we go somewhere private?”
That was the first request she had made all afternoon that made sense.
Sigard looked toward the corridor doors, then back at her.
“You chose the lobby.”
She lowered her voice.
“We came here because you’ve refused every other attempt to meet.”
“I didn’t refuse,” he said.
“I never agreed.
Those aren’t the same thing.”
My father’s patience snapped.
“We are your grandparents.”
Sigard studied him.
“Biologically, yes.”
My mother flinched.
It was remarkable how much one accurate word could disturb people who had arrived demanding ownership of a relationship they had never built.
