He kept his eyes on Lydia when he said it, not because he was unkind to the others but because she was the one who had not been given the afternoon in advance. His voice was even. He had said harder names than this one in rooms more crowded. Still, he felt the old caution move in him, the sense that a name, once spoken, could not be walked back into a folder.
Lydia's hands left her lap. She stood. The cardigan slipped off one shoulder and she did not fix it. The light from the blinds crossed her face and left it, and in the crossing she looked, for a moment, like her mother at the sink, about to say a thing she had been keeping on a high shelf.
"Say it."
"Don't," Mark said.
He had begun to walk. His shoes were quiet on the carpet and loud in his own ears. The table was between him and his sisters, a long polished argument. At the far end the credenza held a bowl of peppermints no one had touched since 2019. He did not look at them. He looked at Penrose's mouth, as if he could stop a word by watching the place it would come from.