His wife’s mother was alive. Had been alive the entire time. Had been meeting Paige occasionally for lunch in Columbus, two hours away, while he was working. The courthouse wedding he had attended had not excluded his parents because they wanted privacy — it had excluded her parents because she had constructed a story in which she had no parents to exclude.
Andrew did not share all of his processing with me. Some of it he shared with Ruth and David. Some of it happened between him and Paige in the privacy of their own life, which was the right place for the most significant part of it. What he shared with me, across several conversations, was enough to understand what the experience was like.
He said he felt like he had been handed a map that turned out to be a drawing of a different city. Everything he thought he knew about the geography of his wife’s history was accurate in its broad outline — there was a father who had died, there was a childhood in Ohio, there was a life before him that had shaped who she was — but the specific facts were wrong in ways that changed the meaning of the map.
“The hardest part,” he told me over coffee in October, “wasn’t the big thing. The big thing — her parents being dead — that was obviously the main lie. But the hardest part was thinking about all the small conversations we’d had about family, about her childhood, about how she thought about things, and wondering how much of what I believed was real.”