Real is what I wanted. Real is what I am living now.
The voicemail is still on my phone. I have not deleted it. I probably will not delete it, not because I am holding onto the difficulty of what it represented, but because three minutes of Ruth Lawson being careful and honest is a thing I want to be able to hear again when I need reminding that people can handle hard things well.
She handled it well. So, eventually, did Paige. So, I hope, did I.
We are all still working at it. That is, in the end, the most accurate thing I can tell you about where we are and where we are going.
Still working at it, and meaning to keep going.
## What I Chose Not to Do
People ask me, sometimes, what I considered doing that I didn’t do. It is a fair question. When something this significant happens, the options you reject tell you as much as the option you choose.
I considered, briefly, calling Andrew before Ruth arranged the dinner. After Ruth told me the situation during that follow-up call, I had Andrew’s last name, which meant I could have found his number. I could have called him directly and introduced myself and said: I am Helen Mercer and I am alive and I am Paige’s mother. I did not do this.
I didn’t do it because it would have been my way of controlling the timing, and the timing was not mine to control. Ruth was already managing this carefully. Paige needed to hear from her husband first, not from a phone call out of nowhere from a mother she had declared dead. If I called Andrew directly before he had heard from Ruth and David, I was circumventing a process that was already being handled with more care than I could have managed in that moment.