What I had not known: that Paige had told the Lawsons I was dead.
What that meant: every story Andrew had heard about his wife’s family, every question his parents had not asked because they did not want to press, every moment in their eighteen-month marriage when my name might have come up — all of it had been structured around my absence from the world.
I was dead.
My daughter had killed me off, quietly, before she introduced herself to the family she was marrying into.
I sat with that for a very long time.
## Who Paige Was Before She Was Someone I Didn’t Recognize
I need to tell you about my daughter, and I need to tell you honestly, which means I cannot tell it all in her favor and I cannot tell it all against her.
Paige grew up in Hartfield, the same Hartfield I still live in. She is the only child of myself and my late husband Carl, who was a machinist at the Heffner Manufacturing plant for twenty-two years before he got sick. We were not wealthy. We were not poor in the way that is grinding and desperate; we had a house, a reliable car, enough to eat, vacations that were camping rather than hotel but were vacations nonetheless. We were what I would call solidly working class, which means that money was always present as a concern but was never a crisis.
Paige was a good student, the kind of student who worked hard and achieved at a high level through effort rather than through the breezy ease that some children seem to have. She was serious and somewhat private. She had a close group of friends through high school and a few genuine friendships rather than a wide social circle. She was perceptive about people in ways that I admired, and she had a quality of attention — really listening when someone talked to her — that made people feel understood.