"Then we do an unfashionable thing," Lauren said. "We wait without a secret engagement and without a performance of indifference. I will still be Emma's Lauren if she wants help with a permission slip. I will not be at dinner every night. You will not kiss me in the driveway until you can say, in daylight, in front of her, that you are kissing me. If that feels like punishment, it isn't. It's the message."
"It feels like a brace," he said. "Those hurt and they keep the bone."
"All right."
They talked for twenty minutes about nothing else of consequence: a student Lauren was worried about, in terms vague enough to be ethical, and a bridge project David was behind on, and whether the maple would survive another wet spring. When they hung up, the house did not feel solved. It felt occupied by the right number of ghosts.
Winter came hard. Emma turned twelve in March and asked for a new charger for the old phone and a book about how sound is stored, which David found both scientific and devastating. She wrote a school essay about a person she admired and chose the librarian who had taken Claire's job, not Claire, because, she told David, "If I write Mom they'll all do the face." He said she could write whatever was true. She said the librarian was also true. Both things stood.