“And?”
“Because grief is complicated,” I said. “Because I kept thinking I would find the right moment and the right moment kept not being now. And because I think I was also protecting myself a little bit from the conversation this would require.”
“This conversation,” Leo said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Because you knew it would require talking about tonight,” he said.
“I didn’t know tonight was going to happen,” I said. “But I knew that bringing Danny into your life fully would eventually require talking about the way people respond to people like him, and I knew that conversation would be uncomfortable for both of us.”
He looked at the photographs.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “About Danny.”
“I know,” I said.
“That doesn’t make what I did okay,” he said.
I looked at my son.
He had gotten there himself, which was the thing I had been hoping for and had not known whether to expect.
