I know what happened because Andrew told me, in the way he had begun to tell me things — carefully and with his own perspective clearly labeled as his own perspective.
About three weeks after the dinner, Paige asked Ruth and David if she could come and speak with them without Andrew present. She wanted to talk to his parents directly, without her husband in the room, and explain herself to them in a way that was not filtered through the family dinner or through Andrew’s ongoing process.
Ruth said yes immediately. David said yes. They sat in the same living room where we’d all had dinner, and Paige talked for a long time.
She told them about growing up in Hartfield, which they already knew she’d grown up in but which they hadn’t known the details of. She told them about Carl’s work, about mine, about the particular way she had experienced the gap between her background and the world she was trying to build. She told them she had made a decision early in her relationship with Andrew that she was not proud of, and that the decision had been driven by a shame that she understood, looking back, was both unfair to her family and unfair to the Lawsons themselves, who had never given her any reason to believe they would judge her for the truth.
She told them she was sorry for deceiving them. She told them she was sorry for denying them a relationship with her mother, which was a sentence she said with what Andrew described as a visible effort at honesty.