“So you never forget what’s yours, Debby,” he’d told me, tapping the glass once with his knuckle.
My father had been gone for three years now, and standing there in the hallway that morning, I found myself missing him with an intensity that caught me off guard, missing the particular steadiness he’d always carried, the way he used to sit at our kitchen table on his visits and quietly notice things nobody else in the family bothered to notice, the way his eyes would flick toward Tyler sometimes during those visits with an expression I hadn’t fully understood back then and understood completely now. He had never said anything critical outright. He had simply insisted, more than once, that I keep certain things in my own name, certain accounts separate, certain paperwork filed carefully away where I alone could find it. I had gone along with it mostly to please him, assuming it was simply an old fashioned instinct left over from his own careful upbringing. Standing in that hallway now, I understood it had never been old fashioned at all. It had been foresight, offered quietly and without ever once making me feel accused of anything.
