Fine lines had gathered at the corners of her blue-gray eyes, and the roundness she had carried in her twenties had sharpened into something elegant and self-contained. But she was unmistakable. The last time David had seen her this close, she had been standing under the awning of a coffee shop in Columbus, one hand pressed against the strap of her purse as she told him she was pregnant and almost certainly carrying another man’s child. David’s phone slipped slightly in his hand.
“I know who she is,” he said. Sarah’s expression tightened. It was not surprise exactly. It was the look of someone who had opened a door expecting an ordinary room and found an old fire still burning behind it.
“It’s been a long time, David.” Megan laughed once because the alternative was immediate seriousness. “Wait. How do you two know each other?”
Nobody answered. The corsage remained unopened on the console table. Connor glanced from his mother to David and then back again, his good prom-night posture beginning to collapse around his shoulders. Megan’s smile vanished.
David felt the room narrowing until the stone fireplace, staircase, family photographs, lamp, and open doorway seemed less like a home than evidence arranged around four people who had not known they were walking into the same story. Sarah looked at Connor first. That was what David noticed later, when he replayed the moment obsessively. Not at David.
Not at Megan. At Connor. Her eyes moved over her son’s face with the kind of fear that does not begin in surprise but in recognition. Then she looked at David again, and something old passed between them without language.
David knew before either of them said it. Not certainly. Not scientifically. But with enough force that his knees weakened.
Connor’s mouth. The set of his eyes. The way he tucked his chin when uncomfortable. David had seen that same expression in photographs of himself at eighteen, the ones Laura used to tease him about because he looked as if the camera had interrupted a philosophical crisis.