I said, “Yes. You did.”
He drove over on the Wednesday and stood in my kitchen — the same kitchen he moved out of in 2019 — and said Willa’s name out loud for the first time in seven years, and then he had to go and stand in the yard for a while.
He and Cal are in a different place now. Not fixed. He has been to two of Cal’s things since June, and in August he asked me if he could have a photograph of her, and I gave him three.
That’s more movement than the previous seven years combined and I’ll take it.
Here’s the part that came out of it that actually matters.
Willa had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and nobody knew, and the reason nobody knew is that a standard sports physical does not include an ECG.
An ECG takes about ten minutes and costs, in bulk, around twenty dollars a student.
