They did what people do. They did surgery and chemistry and the bright false cheer of waiting rooms. Friends brought soup. Naomi took Emma to school on the worst mornings. Helen moved into the guest room for six weeks and alphabetized the spice drawer out of terror. Claire lost her hair and then, oddly, her patience for metaphor. "Don't say battle," she told a well-meaning neighbor. "I'm not a country. I'm a woman who wants to see the spring concert."
She saw the spring concert. Emma played a triangle with ecclesiastical seriousness. Claire sat in the gym with a scarf the color of poppies and cried only after, in the car, because the triangle had been in tune and the world had not.
Lauren entered the story not as a temptation but as a favor.
She had known Claire from a library board committee, the sort of civic boredom that occasionally produces a real friendship. Lauren was a high school counselor, blonde even in fluorescent light, with a habit of remembering the names of people's dogs. She had been divorced for four years from a man who had wanted enthusiasm the way some men want a second refrigerator. She lived across the river in an apartment with too many plants and a view of a parking lot she had trained herself not to resent. When Claire's treatments thickened, Lauren began to appear with practical things: a ride for Emma when the schedule snarled, a folder of school forms, a joke that did not ask Claire to be inspiring.
David noticed her first as relief. Then he noticed her as a person who did not look away from the thinness of Claire's wrists. Then, in a month he would never successfully defend, he noticed that when Lauren laughed in the kitchen he felt, for three seconds, like a man whose life was not only a corridor between dosages. He hated the three seconds. He did not send them away with any skill. Claire, who had always been the archivist of the house, saw more than he wanted and less than she feared. Or so he told himself later. The voicemail, when he finally heard it, would revise even that small comfort.