“You thought honesty would cost you more than dishonesty,” I said.
She looked at me. “Yes.”
“What do you think now?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I think I was wrong.”
It was the most honest thing I had heard her say in a very long time. Possibly ever, about this particular subject.
I did not immediately tell her I forgave her, because I did not. But I held the statement and let it exist.
## David’s Contribution
David Lawson had said very little through the conversation. He ate steadily and he listened and he had a quality of witnessing the whole thing with a gravity that I found, oddly, grounding. When he did speak, it was measured.
He said to Paige: “I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it without defending against it.”
She looked at him.
“Your mother has been at our table for two hours and she is a person that I’m glad to know. The things you were afraid we would think about her — they’re not things that we think. I don’t know where that fear came from. I don’t know what stories you told yourself about us. But the fear was wrong.”
Paige looked down at her plate.
“That’s not a criticism,” he continued. “I’m saying it because I want you to know that the thing you were protecting against didn’t exist. Not here.”
He picked up his fork and continued eating, which was, I thought, the perfect response to saying a hard thing: you say it and then you move on, you don’t perform it.