She texted him.
5 minutes later, he replied.
She read it out loud without anyone asking.
“Stuck in Lynchberg. This dinner’s running long. Don’t wait up.”
My dad looked at Caleb.
Caleb looked at me.
I nodded.
“Paige,” Caleb said gently.
He pulled up the family location app on his phone.
The one Todd apparently forgot existed because he’d never bothered to remove himself from the family plan my dad set up when Caleb was still in high school.
He turned the screen toward Paige.
Todd’s little blue dot was sitting on a hotel on Franklin Road in Rowan Oak, 12 minutes from where we were sitting.
Paige stared at the screen.
She didn’t say anything for what felt like a full minute, but was probably 10 seconds.
Then she looked up at Caleb and said, “That’s got to be a glitch.”
“It’s not a glitch, honey,” my dad said.
And the way he said it, soft and sad, with none of his usual bluster.
That’s when Paige’s face started to change.
The denial cracked.
The defensive posture she’d been holding for months, maybe years, started to crumble.
“How long?” she whispered.
She wasn’t asking Caleb.
She was looking at me.
“At least 14 months,” I said. “Her name is Meredith. She works in his company’s Charlotte office. Multiple people at his work know about it.”
Paige’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t cry the way she’d cried at the October dinner.
That had been shock and embarrassment.
This was something deeper.
This was the sound of a wall coming down.
A wall she built to protect herself from what she probably already knew on some level, but couldn’t afford to face.
“The October dinner,” she said slowly. “When you said boyfriend number 11. You knew then.”
“I suspected,” I said. “I didn’t have proof. I shouldn’t have said it the way I said it. I’m sorry for that.”
“But you were right.”
“Yeah, I was right.”
My mom was crying silently at the end of the table, holding a napkin to her face.
My dad had his hand on Paige’s shoulder.
And for once, he wasn’t performing.
He was just being her dad.
Caleb sat quietly, letting the moment happen without trying to fix it.
Lily, bless her heart, looked up from her chicken nuggets and said, “Why is everyone sad? Did Sparkle die?”
Paige let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and pulled Lily onto her lap.
“No, baby. Sparkle is fine.”
What happened next was Paige’s decision.
Nobody told her what to do.
She sat at that table, held her daughter, and made her own choice.
She called Todd.
He didn’t answer the first time.
She called again.
“Hey, babe, I told you I’m in Lynch…”
“I know where you are, Todd.”
Her voice was shaking but steady.
“I’m looking at your location right now. You’re at the Marriott on Franklin Road, 12 minutes away, and I know about Meredith.”
The silence on the other end of that phone was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
Todd launched into every excuse in the book.
It was a misunderstanding.
The location was wrong.
Meredith was just a colleague.
He actually said, “Baby, who told you this? Was it Anthony? Because you know he’s had it out for me since…”
“Stop,” Paige cut him off. “Don’t come home tonight. I’ll have your things on the porch by morning.”
She hung up.
Set the phone on the table.
And then she looked at me.
“Thank you,” she said.
Just two words.
But they carried the weight of everything that had gone unsaid between us for years.
Every dinner where she’d let Todd insult me and said nothing.
Every time she’d chosen his version of reality over mine.
Every phone call she didn’t make.
And every text she didn’t send during those 7 months I’d been exiled from the family.