Ruth and I continue to work together on the community initiative and to have lunch and to be the kind of friends that two women can be when they find each other through an unexpected door. Our friendship does not depend on the family situation, which I think is why it feels solid.
David and I have talked several times. He is a quieter presence than Ruth but not a small one. He has a dry wit that catches you off guard and a quality of paying attention that makes you feel seen when you talk to him. I think I understand better now why Andrew turned out the way he did.
What is not fully resolved: the grief of the missing eighteen months. The ghost of the civil wedding I was not present for. The fundamental question of what it means that my daughter found it easier to tell her husband’s family I was dead than to introduce me to them. These things do not have resolutions. They are permanent features of what happened, and the work is not to resolve them but to keep them from being the whole story.
The whole story is larger than what Paige did. It includes what we are building now, and what we will build over the years ahead, and the gradual accumulation of ordinary moments — lunches and holidays and phone calls and the occasional difficult conversation — that constitute a real relationship. The real relationship is what I wanted all along. The lie is part of how we got to it, which is a strange and uncomfortable truth, and I try to hold it without making it mean more or less than it does.