It started with questions.

How much do you have in investments. Why isn't more of it in the bank. What if something happened tomorrow, would you be able to get to your money fast enough.

Eddie asked them gently at first, the way you'd ask someone who clearly hadn't thought it through. Not pushing. Just curious. Just looking out for me.

But the questions didn't stay questions for long.

Get it out of there, he told me. Put it where you can actually use it.

He said it the way you'd say something obvious, something everyone already knows. And somehow I was the one who hadn't gotten the memo.

I want to tell you what was happening in me while this was going on, because I think some of you will recognize it.

I am a trusting person. I always have been. For most of my life that's been a quiet kind of grace. I've gotten to move through the world assuming people mean what they say, assuming they want good things for me the way I want good things for them.

Eddie knew that about me before I knew it about myself. People like Eddie always find that out first. It isn't a flaw in a trusting person. It's information a certain kind of person knows exactly what to do with.

So I started to doubt the decisions I'd made for years before I ever met him. The investments I'd built carefully. The plan I'd had for myself, long before his name was part of my life.

I can tell you exactly where I was sitting the day I stopped arguing. I remember the quiet in the room. I remember thinking, he's probably right, I just haven't caught up to it yet.

That's the part I'm still angry at myself for — angry, and if I'm honest, ashamed. Not that he asked. Not even that he told me what to do. I'm angry that some part of me knew, and I let his certainty be louder than my own.

I didn't say no. I didn't even really think about saying no. I just went quiet, and I went along.

Next week I'll tell you what going along with it actually cost me. For tonight, I just want to leave us here, in the quiet, because I think a lot of you have sat in a version of this room. Someone asking questions that weren't really questions. A certainty that wasn't yours, standing in for one that was.

If that's you, I'm not going to tell you what to do with it tonight. I just want you to know you're not the only one who went quiet when you should have said something.

Jaycee is curled up against my leg as I write this, the way she always is when something in the house feels heavy. She doesn't ask me to explain it. She just stays close.

Until next Sunday,
Jane (and Jaycee)