Vivian set the dinner for Sunday, and I understood, the moment she told me, that it was less an invitation than a controlled experiment — a woman testing whether the family she'd spent fifteen years holding together by sheer force of will could survive one more fracture without finally coming apart for good.
"I'm not asking Ethan to forgive anyone," she said, arranging place settings at her own dining table with the brisk precision of a woman who needed her hands occupied to keep the rest of her steady. "I'm asking him to sit in a room with both of you for one hour and prove to himself he's capable of it. Whether he actually can is a separate question."
"He said yes?"
"He said he'd think about it, which from Ethan currently counts as a diplomatic triumph." She straightened a fork a half
