Chapter 48 - The Call Chloe Chose
Chloe decided to call Eric the following spring.
She did not announce the decision dramatically. She mentioned it while helping Maisie paint signs for Arthur's workshop fundraiser.
"I think I'm going to talk to my dad," she said.
My brush stopped in midair.
"Okay."
She looked at me. "You can have a reaction."
"I'm trying not to make my reaction your problem."
"That's annoyingly healthy."
Maisie, sitting at the other end of the table, had headphones on and was singing badly enough that privacy was not an issue.
Chloe explained that Eric's silence after her letter had changed something. He had respected her request for nearly a year. Through Arthur, she knew he still worked, still paid the trust, and had not asked Judith for money. None of that created a relationship. It did make one conversation feel possible.
"I don't want a reunion," she said. "I have questions."
"Then build the call around the questions."
She already had.
Three questions.
Why did you stay away when I was a child?
Why did you use my name on the lease?
What do you expect from me now?
Chloe asked Rebecca to be in her apartment during the call but not in the room. She asked Ms. Chen whether there was any legal reason to avoid contact; there was not. She did not ask me to attend.
The call took place on a Sunday afternoon.
I tried not to think about it.
That was impossible.
Arthur and I took Maisie to a hardware store for workshop supplies. I spent twenty minutes comparing screws I did not care about. Arthur finally said, "Checking your phone isn't going to improve their conversation."
"I'm not checking."
"You're staring at your pocket."
Fair.
Chloe called me at six.
"It's done," she said.
Her voice sounded tired but steady.
"Do you want company?"
"Can I come over?"
"Of course."
She arrived with Rebecca half an hour later. Rebecca stayed in the kitchen with Arthur while Chloe and I sat on the back porch.
"He answered the questions," she said.
The first answer was the ugliest. Eric admitted he stayed away because contact required him to confront how unreliable he was. When Chloe was young, he told himself Rebecca was better off without him. When Chloe became old enough to ask questions, shame made avoidance easier. Judith's interference helped him avoid contact, but he admitted he welcomed that help.
"He said seeing me made him feel like a failure," Chloe said. "So he made sure I was the one who had to live with him disappearing."
There was nothing useful I could add.
The second answer matched his letter. He used Chloe's information because he was desperate to secure the apartment and convinced himself he could fix the paperwork later. He knew it was wrong when he did it.
The third answer surprised her.
"He said he expects nothing," Chloe told me. "He hopes maybe we talk again someday. But he said I don't owe him a relationship."
"How did that feel?"
"Infuriating."
I laughed softly.
"Because it's the right answer now and I needed him to know it twenty years ago."
That made sense.
Chloe had not forgiven him during the call. She did not tell him she loved him. She did not agree to meet. At the end, she said she needed time and would contact him if she wanted another conversation.
Eric said okay.
Then they hung up.
"I thought I would feel different," she admitted.
"You are different. The feeling might take longer."
"Or it might not come."
"True."
She watched Arthur through the kitchen window. "He sounded like him."
"What do you mean?"
"I remembered his voice from when I was little. I didn't expect that to matter."
Good memories were inconvenient.
Rebecca came outside later. She and Chloe sat together without speaking. I went inside and gave them the porch.
Over the next few weeks, Chloe did not call Eric again. She did not regret the first call either. She told her therapist—someone she had started seeing during the lease dispute—that the conversation had answered factual questions without creating an emotional obligation.
"Apparently that's allowed," she told me.
"We're building quite a list of allowed things."
Northline kept growing. Chloe hired a part-time administrative assistant named Tessa for ten hours a week, mostly to handle scheduling and invoices. The decision terrified her because it meant becoming responsible for someone else's pay.
"Pay on time," I advised.
"Brilliant."
"I have more. Don't use her identity to co-sign a lease."
She stared at me, then laughed so hard she nearly spilled coffee.
Humor had become possible around scars that once only hurt.
In June, Eric sent Chloe no message on her birthday, because she had not invited further contact. Instead, Arthur received a text asking whether it would violate her boundary if he passed along birthday wishes.
Arthur told him yes, probably.
Eric accepted that.
Chloe learned about the exchange months later and sat quietly for a long time.
"He wanted to," she said.
"Yes."
"And didn't."
"Yes."
That mattered to her more than a card would have.
Before leaving that night, Chloe wrote the date of the call in her records binder. Not as a beginning or an anniversary, she said, just as another fact she was entitled to remember accurately.
A relationship was not being rebuilt yet.
Trust, perhaps, was accumulating in tiny units outside it.
Not enough for access.
Enough for one chosen phone call.
May you like
For Chloe, that was exactly the amount she wanted.
Before Chloe left that evening, she wrote the three questions on a card and placed it in her wallet. She told me she did not trust herself to remember them once she heard Eric's voice. I understood the impulse. Strong emotion had a way of turning conversations into whatever the other person needed. A written card gave her a small rail to hold. When she called him weeks later, she would later tell me, she kept one finger on that card the entire time. The questions did not control the conversation. They kept it from controlling her.
