Harrison did not do something. He held her arm and stared at me with the eyes of a boy who had once brought home a broken lamp and expected me to fix it without asking how it broke.
I stood in my pale yellow silk blouse with the firelight painting one side of my face and the ruined lemon cake painting the other, and I felt, for the first time in twelve months, the clean hard edge of a boundary I should have drawn the week they moved in.
"Happy birthday to me," I said, and the guests, who did not know whether to leave or applaud, chose the safer option of silence.
They had arrived on a Tuesday in September with two suitcases and a promise that sounded, at the time, like family.
Harrison stood in my foyer with his hands in his pockets and the particular tiredness of a man who has been arguing with apartments and credit scores and a wife who wanted granite counters before she wanted a lease. Sloan stood beside him in a cream trench coat that cost more than my first car, dark hair perfect, smile calibrated for mothers. The house smelled of the coffee I had made when Harrison called to say they were twenty minutes away. Outside, the maple on the front lawn had begun its slow turn toward rust.
"Just a few months," Harrison said. "Until we close on something. Mom, you're rattling around in this place alone anyway."