"Yeah, we all know that's exactly what he's doing," Beverly says, huffing out a laugh with little humor behind it. Even that, she sort of gets. He must have expected people to react a certain way, and kept a distance to try to prevent that from happening, or to try to wait out some of the weirdness while really only making it weirder. It just sucks, feeling like everything is fragmented, just one more way in which everything has felt so upended and unsteady lately.

"Maybe it'll be good, though. For him to have heard from you that things don't have to be so weird. However it happened."