"How long?" she asked.
Marcus looked at the framed photographs on the wall instead of at her. Cannon Beach. Frosting. Christmas sweaters.
"Almost two years," he said.
Two years. Twenty-four months of late shifts and early meetings and the careful architecture of a marriage she had believed was built on the kind of honesty that survived hard seasons. Two years of a woman entering spaces Aaliyah thought of as theirs—Marcus's office, perhaps this house when Aaliyah was at the hospital—and leaving before the garage door announced her return. Two years of Elias knowing a nice lady the way children know weather: as a recurring fact, unexplained and therefore normal.
Aaliyah set the cardigan down. She picked up the makeup pouch. The zipper was cheap; it stuck halfway. Inside, beside the berry lipstick, she found a travel-size powder compact, a folded grocery receipt from Fred Meyer dated three days earlier, and a small photograph, soft at the corners from handling. She drew the photograph out.
It was Elias at the park near Marcus's office park, on the green plastic dinosaur in the toddler area he had outgrown last year but still claimed. Beside him sat a woman in her early sixties with gray threaded through her straightened hair, a careful smile, and this same beige cardigan buttoned to the throat. One of the woman's hands rested lightly on Elias's shoulder. The boy was laughing at something beyond the frame.
Aaliyah's hands began to shake.