That parallel track is what sits with me most. Not the lie as an event — I can trace the lie’s origins, I can understand the escalation, I can see how one decision made the next one inevitable — but the duration. The sheer quantity of ordinary days that ran while I was dead in a story I didn’t know I was in.
I am out of that story now. I am in the real one, which is the only one I ever wanted to be in.
The real one is imperfect and ongoing and has no clean ending available to it, because families do not end cleanly — they just continue, changed by what they have been through, carrying the weight of it differently depending on how they handled it.
I handled it the best I could with what I had. So did Ruth, and Andrew, and eventually Paige. That is, in the end, what I have to work with: we all showed up, and we did not do it perfectly, and we are still here.
Still here is not a small thing.
I was supposed to be dead. I am not. I would like to make the most of that.
## One More Thing About Ruth
The day before Thanksgiving, Ruth called to ask whether I needed anything for the meal. Not in a charitable way — not the call you make to someone you feel sorry for — but in the practical way you call a person you have already started to depend on. Did I have everything I needed, and if not, she was going to the store in the morning.