I wanted Ruth and David to understand the situation accurately, which was that Paige had made a choice to exclude me from her marriage in the most complete way she could imagine, and that the exclusion was not mutual and was not something I had agreed to.
I wanted Paige to say, in a room with other people present, something true about why she had done what she did.
I did not want to destroy my daughter’s marriage. I did not want to perform forgiveness I hadn’t gotten to yet. I did not want to make the Lawsons feel responsible for something they hadn’t done.
I got out of the car.
Ruth answered the door. She was in her mid-sixties and had the bearing of a woman who had been in charge of something significant for a long time: direct, warm, organized in her manner. She shook my hand and then she looked at me for a moment and she said: “Thank you for coming, Helen.”
“Thank you for calling,” I said, and I meant it entirely.
David Lawson was in the kitchen, an ordinary-looking man who had the particular quality of someone who manages difficulty with quietness rather than statement. He shook my hand and said it was good to meet me and I could see that he meant it and that it was also costing him something to be in this position.
Paige and Andrew were already there. Paige was standing near the kitchen counter, and when I came through from the foyer she looked at me the way she had been looking at me at critical moments since she was eleven years old: with the combination of defiance and desperate need for approval that had always made my heart hurt a little.