I would like that. I think Paige would like that too, though she does not yet know exactly how to ask for it. I am waiting for her to find the words. I am not going to wait forever, but I can wait a little longer.
She will find them. She usually does.
## How the Truth Lands
There is something specific about learning you were declared dead by someone who loves you.
I have tried to explain this to Donna, to articulate what is strange about it beyond the obvious strangeness. She listened carefully and then said: “It’s like finding out someone wrote a version of your life where you weren’t in it, and then lived inside that version for two years.”
That is close. What I would add is the part about being the one who has to keep living the actual version while the false one was running in parallel. I was here. Working my shifts at Crestwood. Showing up to planning meetings. Calling Paige on her birthday and being told she was busy and she’d call back, and sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t, and I read this as ordinary daughter behavior because I had no reason to read it as anything else.
I was alive the entire time. I was having my ordinary life. I was not dramatic or exceptional or particularly interesting during the eighteen months of my daughter’s marriage; I was just a fifty-nine-year-old widow doing her job and her volunteer work and her life. And somewhere in a different part of Ohio, the people who were now my family by marriage had been told I was not doing any of this because I was not here to do it.