"I'm not asking you to be ready."
"I am ready to not sleep in the car," she said. "That is my current ceiling."
"I'll take the couch after we move Toby to the bunk room."
"No," Elise said. "You will sleep in the bed because Toby will look for you if he wakes, and I will not turn tonight into a performance of exile for a seven-year-old. You will sleep on your side. You will not reach for me. And in the morning we will drink coffee and continue this like adults who still live in the same story even when the plot has gone feral."
Daniel nodded. "Okay."
They went back inside. Daniel carried Toby to the small bunk room at the end of the hall, the boy's head heavy on his shoulder, the smell of pasta and childhood shampoo rising from his hair. Elise packed the contents of the coral handbag back into place with ceremonial care, all except the letters, which she kept. She set the bag on the highest shelf of the bedroom closet, above Daniel's sweaters, and shut the door.
Sleep, when it came, was thin. Elise woke twice to the sound of the wind and once to Daniel's breathing, steady and human and insufficient as apology. She thought of Natalie at Toby's baptism, mascara imperfect, whispering that some women were meant to be aunts and that she had never minded until she minded. She thought of Mara somewhere in Oregon, a young mother with a dead birth mother's jawline, waiting for a medical history that had been sitting under Daniel's socks in a duffel bag.
Near dawn, Elise whispered into the dark, not sure if Daniel was awake: "If we contact her, we do it without making Natalie into a saint or you into a martyr. We do it as people who failed in ordinary ways and are trying not to fail again."