“Your voice is different,” she said.
“So is yours.”
I remembered hers calling from the kitchen, asking whether I had packed my schoolbag. I didn’t know what to do with the same voice coming out of a phone in my own flat.
“Dad said you didn’t want contact,” I told her.
“He told me that if I wanted to speak to you, I had to come back and take care of him. Those were his terms.”
“You could have told me.”
“I tried to reach you through him. Then I gave you the letter.”
I pressed my bare foot against the floor. “You could have kept trying.”
“Yes,” she said. “I could have.”
That answer annoyed me more than an argument would have. I had seven years of accusations ready. She wasn’t answering them the way I had rehearsed.
“When you didn’t reply,” Celia continued, “I thought you’d read it and decided you agreed with him. I stopped trying. I was tired of asking permission to have a life. And I was angry with you.”
“With me?”
“You were seventeen. I knew that. It still hurt.”
I looked at the letter beside my phone. She had left me a way to answer her that didn’t go through Dad. I had refused to use it, then counted the years without an answer as something she had done to me.
“Did you think I’d come back if you waited?” Celia asked.
I had. Not necessarily because of the letter. I had imagined her discovering that leaving felt worse than staying, arriving with her bags and admitting I had been right to hate her for it.
“Yes,” I said.
“And when I didn’t?”
“I kept being angry.”
The part I needed to say next sounded petty before I even said it. I wanted to replace it with something about being young, or about Dad. Both were true. Neither was the answer.
“I didn’t read it, Celia. Not until yesterday.”
She didn’t speak.
“I knew where it was. Every time I moved, I took it with me. I wanted you to know I wouldn’t read your explanation. I wanted to punish you.”
My face felt hot. There was nobody in the room to hide it from.
“I thought you understood what I was saying,” she said at last. “I thought you’d chosen not to answer.”
“I did choose not to answer. I just made sure I didn’t have to know what I was answering.”
She took a breath close to the phone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For that. Not just for taking a long time.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. I had no right to make her provide that on the same call.
“Could we meet?” I asked.
“Yes. We can meet.”
I started telling her about Dad’s wrist and his demand that I resign. Halfway through, she interrupted.
“June, I need to be clear before we meet. I’m not coming back to be his carer.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
I said it too quickly. Some part of me had already pictured the two of us dividing the work, which would have meant handing her back the thing she had spent seven years refusing.
“Okay,” Celia said. “But seeing you and taking care of him are separate things.”
We agreed to choose somewhere after I checked my shifts. Before we hung up, I saved her number under her name. Not through Dad. Not on a scrap I might lose.
The next morning I called community care about a reassessment. I couldn’t use a seven-year-old approval to decide what Dad needed now. I also couldn’t accept his demand as an assessment just because he was my father.
Rosa, the assessor, asked to speak with him about arranging a visit. I took my phone to his kitchen that afternoon.
He wouldn’t look at the photographs.
“Old paperwork,” he said.
“Yesterday you said there wasn’t an offer.”
