Lydia did not sit. Her voice, when it came, was smaller than her standing and more dangerous for that.
"If it's not me, then who—"
Penrose did not answer. Mark stopped at the window with his back to them, one hand on the blind cord, not pulling it. Helen's thumb moved once over her knuckle and was still. The sentence Lydia had started hung in the striped light, unfinished, and the name stayed where Evelyn Harlan had put it, inside the folder, waiting for a moment that had not yet agreed to be this one.
Outside, the bus pulled away. Inside, no one spoke. The house on Orchard Street, which could not hear them, went on holding its rooms in the order Evelyn had left them: the blue bedroom with the shade half drawn, the kitchen clock that ran three minutes fast, the grape leaves already thinking about October. Whatever was going to be said next would have to travel back through years before it could become a name. The people at the table did not know that yet. They only knew that something had been altered, and that the youngest of them had not been invited to hear it, and that she was standing anyway.
