The foyer light was still on when Laura pushed open the door with her shoulder, the weight of her travel bag biting into her palm. Beyond the threshold the family room glowed the way it always had after dark: warm lamps, the stone fireplace with its neat stack of birch logs, the portraits lined along the mantel like a quiet jury. Suitcases waited by the wall—hers, freshly dragged in from the airport, and two others she did not recognize, upright and closed as if mid-stay. On the coffee table, the baby monitor sat among magazines and a half-finished mug, its green light pulsing.
Ethan ran first.
"Mom! You're home!"
She dropped the bag and caught him hard against her chest, burying her face in hair that smelled of shampoo and the outdoors. Eight months. She had counted them in hospital corridors and rental-bed sheets and the long silences after her mother finally slept.
"I missed you more than anything."
From upstairs, thin and sudden, a baby cried.
Laura's arms tightened. She turned toward the coffee table, toward the monitor whose speaker now carried the sharp, rhythmic complaint of an infant she had never met.
"What was that?"
Daniel stood near the fireplace in a dark-green henley, short brown hair flattened on one side as if he had been dozing on the couch. His hazel eyes found hers and held, tense.