Lauren, thirty-four, practical, married to a kind man who knew when to leave sisters alone with wine, sat with Madison on the porch the first week and said the things sisters say when sympathy and rage need equal airtime.
"He is a coward," Lauren said. "And you are allowed to burn every photograph. Or keep them. Or cut his face out and leave yours. There is no correct ritual for this."
Madison drank the wine. Green eyes swollen. Brunette waves unstyled. "I keep thinking about the baby," she said. "Eli. Four months old. Sleeping through his father's almost-wedding. And I hate that I feel anything for him at all, because he is proof, and also he is just a baby who didn't ask."
"Feeling something for a baby doesn't mean you have to forgive Daniel," Lauren said. "Those are different rooms."
Madison nodded. She did not yet know which rooms she would be able to enter.
On Thursday at noon, Daniel met Ava in Forsyth Park beneath the live oaks where Spanish moss hung like the city's soft, perpetual judgment. He wore jeans and a button-down instead of a tuxedo, dark hair slightly less neat, trimmed beard the same, eyes shadowed by nights spent staring at a ceiling that offered no advice. He carried a bag of diapers, wipes, and a soft blue toy elephant that looked like it had been chosen by a man who had stood too long in a store aisle trying to guess what atonement looked like in plush form.
Ava arrived with Eli in a stroller, platinum hair in a loose knot, sunglasses hiding the part of her face that still wanted to flinch when she saw Daniel. She wore jeans and a white blouse. No emerald. No heels. The performance portion of their shared history had ended in a church; what remained was the labor.
"He just ate," she said. "He'll be awake for about forty minutes. You can hold him. You can change him if he needs it. You do not get to take him for ice cream and photograph yourselves like a weekend dad magazine spread."