Eight is a terrible age for it. Old enough to understand permanently, young enough that nobody thinks to ask him anything.
For about two years he barely spoke about her. Then somewhere around eleven he started asking me questions, hundreds of them, mostly small — what she ate, what she was scared of, whether she was funny.
She was extremely funny. She was funny in a way that got her in trouble.
His father, Vaughn, could not do any of it.
I want to be fair to him and I have had a decade to work out how. Vaughn Tarrant did not stop loving his daughter. He simply could not be in a room where her name was said out loud, and after about 2018 he arranged his life so that he never had to be.
He moved out in August of 2019. We divorced in 2020. He lives about forty minutes away and he’s had Cal every other weekend for six years and he has never once, in that entire time, said Willa’s name in front of him.
Cal told me that when he was fifteen. He said it like a fact about the weather.
So here’s what my son did, and I did not know about most of it until afterward.
In January of this year — January, five months out — Cal Tarrant, eighteen years old, made an appointment with his principal.
He went into Dr. Ferris Odom’s office on a Tuesday and asked whether the school still had his sister’s diploma.
They did.
I did not know that. I want to be extremely clear: I did not know that a diploma with my daughter’s name on it had been sitting in a records room at that school for ten years.
