"I know what it looks like."
"Do you?" She laughed once, a short sound with no humor in it. "Because what it looks like is that our five-year-old has been playing dress-up with a woman who comes to your office when I'm not home. A woman who leaves things behind. A woman he calls nice. A woman who always—his word, Marcus—always leaves before I come home." She picked up the cardigan. The wool smelled of powder and jasmine and something like rain on old carpet. "And this. God. This."
"Aaliyah—"
"Don't." She held the cardigan up between them. "I've seen this sweater before. I've put my face in this sweater. When I was eight. When I was ten. When she was sober enough to let me." Her throat tightened. "Or am I wrong? Am I inventing that? Tell me I'm inventing that."
Marcus's silence was not the silence of a man who had been sleeping with a stranger. It was worse. It was the silence of a man who had been keeping a different kind of secret, one with a name and a history and a claim on the child who had just walked out of the room.
"You're not inventing it," he said at last.
The dryer clicked off. In the sudden quiet Aaliyah heard Elias in the family room narrating a car crash to himself in a high soft voice, and the sound of her son's imagination going on as if the world had not tilted made her want to sit down on the laundry room floor and not get up.