Claire did not come forward. She stood just inside the door, by the reception desk, and looked around the room, at the framed portraits on the walls, at the bench, as if checking that everything was where she had left it. Then she looked back at Natalie.
"You look like the picture," she said. "But older."
"I am older."
"Yeah." Claire's mouth twitched. "Obviously."
She crossed the room and sat down in one of the chairs. She did not take off her jacket. Natalie sat in the other. For a while neither of them said anything, and the silence was not comfortable, but it was not unbearable either. It was simply the silence of two people who had been in the same room once before, eighteen years ago, when one of them was three days old.
"I wrote down questions," Claire said abruptly. She pulled a folded index card out of her jacket pocket. "So I wouldn't forget. Is that weird?"