The tenderness of that detail nearly undid her. Sheets. Hope. A husband making a bed for a wife while another woman soothed another man's child two doors down.
"I'm going to shower," Laura said. "Then I'm going to sleep. Tomorrow you will show me every paper. Guardianship order. Will. Whatever the court signed. And Rachel and I will talk without you translating."
Daniel nodded. "Whatever you need."
She stood, coat still on, and felt ridiculous. She peeled it off and hung it on the banister the way she always had. The gesture was so ordinary it hurt.
The second night, insomnia sent Laura downstairs at 2:17 a.m. according to the microwave clock. The family room lamps were off; only the fireplace's cold stone and the portraits' glass caught the streetlight. She stood barefoot on the hardwood and tried to remember the house as it had been in February, the last morning she left for the airport with a return ticket she kept extending. Then the rooms had smelled of Daniel's coffee and Ethan's cereal. Now they smelled faintly of detergent and the sweet powder of diaper cream.
She opened the drawer beneath the coffee table again and reread the guardianship order by phone light. Legal sentences had a way of sounding both absolute and provisional: WHEREAS, NOW THEREFORE, IT IS ORDERED. Chris's signature on the will excerpt was a hurried slash. He had signed his son's future the way men signed credit receipts—believing the worst was theoretical.
Laura set the papers down and walked to the toy shelf. Ethan's old dump truck sat beside a teething ring. She picked up the soft giraffe, squeezed it, heard a faint squeak. Somewhere above her, through floors and habit, a woman who was not her slept within reach of an infant who was not hers, and the arrangement was both noble and intolerable.
She made tea she did not drink. She sat in Chris's armchair and whispered, to empty air, "You should have asked me." The armchair did not answer. Grief, she had learned at her mother's bedside, was full of one-sided conversations.