“Yes,” Paige said.
“What were you planning to do long-term?” Andrew asked. “Eventually we’d have wanted to meet your family. What were you planning to tell us if we had kids?”
Paige’s face changed. This was the question that hurt, and I could see that she had been sitting with it herself in the days before this dinner.
“I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I kept thinking I would figure it out. That I would find a way to introduce them — introduce you, Mom — at some point when it would be less –“
“Less what?” I asked.
“Less everything,” she said. “Less obvious that I had lied about something so basic.”
Andrew pushed back from the table slightly, not enough to leave it, just enough to need the space. “The wedding,” he said. “Helen wasn’t there because you told me she didn’t exist.”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t know that. She thought we just wanted a private ceremony.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head slowly. Not at Paige, exactly. At the architecture of it, the number of pieces that had to have been carefully arranged to keep this structure standing.
“I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a lot to take in,” he said. “Because it is. I’ve been sitting with it for a week and I’m still –” He stopped. “I still don’t entirely understand how we got here.”
“I made a decision early,” Paige said. “And then every decision after that was built on top of it. And by the time I understood what I had done, I didn’t know how to undo it without losing everything.”