I also considered, very briefly, not going to dinner at all. Sending a message through Ruth: tell Andrew I exist, tell him I’m sorry for whatever confusion my existence causes, but I am not ready to sit in a room with Paige and perform normalcy. Let her manage this without me in the center of it.
I rejected that option within about two minutes of considering it, because it was fear talking. I was afraid of what the dinner would be — afraid of seeing Paige’s face when she had to account for herself in front of people who loved her and wanted better from her. I was afraid of Andrew, of meeting someone who had been told I was dead and had to now look at me and decide what I was. I was afraid of Ruth and David, who were strangers handling a situation I had not asked to be part of.
Fear is not a good reason to stay home from something important. I went.
I considered, in the days after the dinner, going public in some way. Not in an aggressive or vindictive way, but — telling people what had happened, the way people tell stories about their lives. Telling Donna in full, which I did. Telling my coworkers, which I largely did not. Posting about it somewhere, which I absolutely did not.
I didn’t go public because the story belonged to multiple people, and those people were trying to find their way through it. Telling it widely while Paige was still in the middle of rebuilding with Andrew would have made it harder for her to move through the consequences naturally. I did not owe her privacy, but I also did not owe the world the most painful details of her failure.