Mei's face changed. Not into panic exactly — into something slower and more terrible, the look of a person watching a carefully stacked life tip one degree past the point of recovery. She took a half step into the room.
"Sweetheart…"
Marcus's dark eyes did not leave his wife's face. The pale-blue of his own shirt suddenly felt like a costume he had worn without knowing the play. His wedding band pressed cold against his finger when he closed his hand.
"When was he in our bedroom?"
The question hung in the early evening light and did not come down. Nora blinked between them, still swimming in white cotton and navy silk, still six, still certain that dressing like a grown-up was the most important thing that had happened that day. Mei's mouth parted. No answer arrived. The silence that took its place was not empty; it was crowded with every hour she had spent believing she could keep two truths in separate rooms of the same house.
Marcus did not raise his voice. He never needed to. He looked at the shirt on his daughter as if it were a document, as if the cloth itself had signed a confession. Then he looked at Mei again, and whatever softness he had carried upstairs from the driveway and the kitchen and the ordinary hope of dinner drained out of his expression one careful drop at a time.
"Nora," he said, and his voice found the father register even while everything else in him was breaking formation. "Baby girl. Go take that off and put on your pajamas. Leave the shirt on Mommy's chair."
Nora's ponytail tipped. "But I look professional."