Tess, and the thing I said out loud

Told Tess about the question at the sink. The whole thing, including that I had nothing to say and that I have worked out since what I would have said. She said: so what would it take. Same question. Different mouth. And this time I had it, because I had spent two days writing it down, so I said it out loud for the first time: I think I need him to tell me the whole of something before I find it out. And then I sat there slightly appalled at having said it in a restaurant. Tess did not do anything with it. She did not say the obvious thing about Greg, which she knows about, and she did not say that sounds like a reasonable ask, which would have made it into a request with a verdict attached. She let it be in the room and ate her eggs and after a while said, that is a sentence you could say to him exactly like that. Which is the most useful thing anybody has said to me in a month, and the reason I tell her things. Then she told me about her head of department and the timetabling and I was grateful for all eleven minutes of it.

Honestly? The risk is that it gets refined. That I take a clean sentence and work on it until it is fair and balanced and acknowledges his side, and by Thursday it is four paragraphs long and says nothing. I have done that before.