She climbed the steps two at a time. Her eyes were wide and wet and furious with the particular helplessness of a child who has discovered that adults cry and that crying does not stop when you ask it to.
"She won't stop crying."
He was already moving, keys forgotten, phone forgotten, the screen door banging shut behind him. Ava seized his hand — small, warm, insistent — and pulled him across the lawn toward the Ellison house, the cream colonial with the blue shutters and the porch light that Marcus had always left on until the night he didn't come home.
"I found this in Dad's desk," Ava said, and only then did Thomas notice what she was holding in her other hand: an envelope, cream-colored, sealed, the paper slightly warped as if it had lived for a long time in a drawer that was opened and closed and opened again by someone who never quite decided what to do with it.
"It was never opened."
They were through the Ellison front door before Thomas could ask another question. The house smelled of lemon oil and laundry and the faint ghost of the cologne Marcus used to wear. In the living room, beneath the framed photograph of the three of them at Virginia Beach, Monique Ellison sat on the edge of the sofa in a cream blouse, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with the kind of weeping that has nothing left to negotiate with.
She was thirty-seven. She looked, in that moment, much older and much younger at once.
"Monique, are you okay?" Thomas said.