"What nice lady?"
Elias shrugged, necklace chiming softly against the cardigan's buttons, as if the answer were the most ordinary fact in the world.
"The one who always leaves before Mommy comes home."
The dryer hummed. Outside, a neighbor's leaf blower coughed and died. Aaliyah felt the floor of the laundry room hold, and hold, and hold.
"Always?"
She did not wait for him to answer. She could not have waited. The word had already done its work inside her, a small precise blade, and something in her chest had opened along an old seam she had spent years stitching shut. Elias stood between them in another woman's wool, gold flashing at his throat, the makeup pouch dangling from his fingers like a trophy from a game nobody had explained to him, and Aaliyah understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, that the room she had been standing in five minutes earlier was not the room she stood in now.
Marcus rose from the sofa. He moved the way men move when they have been caught in something they hoped would stay invisible: carefully, as if the air itself might bruise. He crossed into the laundry room and knelt in front of Elias, and Aaliyah watched his hands—those familiar hands, the wedding band catching light—reach for the cardigan's lapels as if he meant only to undress a child who had gotten into the costume bin.