[Z]

Asking for a friend (whose name rhymes with Meg)...

If a member of your family had been exceptionally horrible to you for the last 4 months and things had gotten so bad between you that the entire family was a mess and the person who was being horrible to you had ended up isolating themselves from everyone else and was laughably now acting like the victim even though they are the perpetrator, and another member of the family had told them they needed to apologise to you even though you yourself had told the offending family member this yourself on multiple occasions and they were only now, after all this time, going to apparently apologise to you today after they'd been told to, going to apologise to you... would you accept the apology? Even though at this stage you're only anticipating how it might go, you're pretty confident (let's say 99% certain) that it will not be a genuine apology because they haven't acknowledged why they are apologising or what they are sorry for and they're only doing it because they've been told they have to, and you feel like if you accepted the apology, you would be forgiving them when they aren't really sorry so they won't have learned a lesson?

Should ...my friend... >________>... accept the apology (assuming it's coming tonight) even though it's very likely it won't be at all genuine for the sake of acknowledging that even though this person isn't at all sorry, they've done a very out of character thing by even saying the word sorry and you know that despite how unapologetic they are really, it's still a massive step for them to say the word 'sorry' out loud; or should my friend whose name rhymes with "beg" refuse to accept the probably fake apology and continue to wait in vain for a genuine one? My friend whose name rhymes with "leg" knows that if they refuse to accept this one, the offending family member will go in a huff and say "well I tried, what am I supposed to do now?" and likely never offer an olive branch again and because this tension has been going on for so long, it's affected everyone else in the family, so a lot is riding on how this is handled...