Paige and Andrew drove home separately in their one car — I mean they drove home to their own place together, which I understood was going to be a continuation of a different conversation than the one we’d all been having at the table. The conversation between two married people when one of them has been revealed to have built eighteen months of a marriage on a foundational lie is not a conversation that happens at someone else’s dinner table.
I drove home to my own house and I sat in the dark kitchen without turning on the lights for a while. I was not sad, exactly. I was wrung out in the way that comes from having been honest and been present for other people’s honesty for three and a half hours.
I called Donna.
“How did it go?” she said.
“Better than I expected,” I said. “Not as good as I’d hoped. About exactly what was possible for one dinner.”
“That’s usually the best you get.”
“Yeah.”
“And Paige?”
“She’s got a lot of work ahead of her,” I said. “With Andrew, mostly. The thing with me — I’m her mother. She knows who I am and she knows I love her and she knows I’m not going anywhere, even when I’m furious. Andrew is different. He’s her husband and she built their marriage on something that wasn’t true, and rebuilding that is harder and more important than whatever she and I are going to figure out.”
“Is Andrew going to stay?”