"Why didn't you listen to your phone?" Emma asked, and the question was so simple it leveled him.
"Because it was the old number. Because I had a new phone and a dying wife and I treated the rest of the world like mail I could open later. Because I am a man who puts cracked things in drawers." He looked at the device on the table. "She tried to reach me. I was busy failing to imagine she had anything left to say that wasn't about pain scales."
Helen stood, finally, and took off her coat. The gesture had the weight of a decision. She hung it on the back of Claire's chair, not sitting, just claiming the chair as still belonging to the family and not to a ghost story. "Then we do what she said," Helen said. "We stop performing. David, you did not marry today. Good. That was the first adult thing the afternoon produced. Now you will not sneak a courthouse later and call it sensitivity. Emma will not be asked to be grateful on a schedule. Lauren, you will not manage this child like a crisis at school. She is not your student. She is the daughter of a woman who trusted you with a precise instruction."
"I know," Lauren said.
"Do you?" Helen's voice did not rise. "Trusted you and warned you in the same breath. That is Claire. If you stay, you stay inside that sentence. If you go, you go without making Emma carry your exit."