I wasn’t fooled. I was comfortable. There’s a difference, and the difference is on me.
Three: she asked me to follow him — and the thing is, she asked for help twice, and I only noticed the second time.
In March of that year, six months before the oak tree, she asked me if she could come live with me.
She asked it in the car. She made it sound like a sleepover. “Grandpa, what if I just lived at your house?”
And I laughed and said something about how her dad would miss her too much.
She tried the easy way first. Because she was seven and because that’s what a kid does — she offered me a version I could say yes to without anything being wrong.
And I said no, cheerfully, in about two seconds, and she had to go back and carry it alone for another six months and come up with a harder way to ask.
