“How much of it do you think was real?” I asked.
He thought about it. “Most of it, I think. The feelings were real. The parts about her father were true. The way she talks about growing up, the things she carries from it — those read as true.” He paused. “The false part was narrow. It was specific: me being dead, the Lawsons not existing in her story. But it was structural.”
“Structural.”
“Yeah. Like a load-bearing wall that was wrong. The rest of the house was mostly fine, but one wall was completely wrong, and when you find that out you have to check everything else even if everything else is okay.”
I understood that. The checking is the exhausting part. When you discover that one significant thing was wrong, you do not simply note it and move on; you have to go back through everything and assess whether it is actually what you thought it was. This is not paranoia. It is the reasonable response to having been lied to about something large.
“Have you finished checking?” I asked.
He considered. “Mostly. There are still things I ask about that I might not have asked about before, and Paige — she answers them. Fully, not managing it. That’s new.”
“Is it enough?”
“For now,” he said. “I think for now.”
It is the answer you give when you have decided to trust a process rather than a conclusion. He was staying in the marriage, investing in it, but he was doing it with his eyes open in a way that was different from before, and that open-eyed quality was something Paige was going to have to earn her way through over time.