"Let her have this one, Mom. It's her first Christmas in the house."
It was my thirty-first Christmas in the house. I put the angel back in the attic. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself love was a kind of editing, and mothers were supposed to be good at cutting themselves out of frames.
Winter deepened. The house settled into a new geography of power that no one named out loud.
Sloan slept until ten. Harrison left for the firm at seven-thirty and came home at seven, smelling of printer toner and the particular defeat of men who bill their hours and still cannot afford the life their wives have already purchased in their imaginations. I kept my gallery shifts and my Tuesday book club and the illusion that I was a hostess rather than a displaced person in my own rooms. At night I lay in the guest bedroom — I had given them the master, because Harrison asked, because Sloan said the guest mattress hurt her back, because I was a mother and mothers move to smaller rooms the way tides move, without being asked twice — and I listened to Sloan's voice through the wall, low and dissatisfied, listing the apartments she would not accept and the kitchens she deserved.
In February I found her using my grandmother's china for takeout. In March I found a cigarette burn on the arm of the living room sofa and a shrug when I asked about it. In April Harrison asked if they could borrow two thousand dollars for a deposit on a condo that fell through two weeks later, the money somehow already spent on what Sloan called "necessities," which turned out to include a weekend in Napa and a handbag I was not supposed to notice.
I noticed.
I did not yet know how to stop noticing without becoming the villain of a story Sloan was already telling at brunch.