Carol found her voice and spent it badly. "We should — the gifts — Richard, don't just stand there." Richard did not move. He had the stunned courtesy of a man who had been invited to celebrate and had instead become a witness, and he hated scenes the way some men hate illness, as a disorder that ought to have been prevented by character. Daniel lowered his hands. He looked at Andre, measured him once, and decided that if anyone was going to be between Jason and a stranger tonight it would be him and not their father-in-law.
"Jason," Daniel said, quiet. "Kid's here."
"I know where my daughter is." Jason's eyes did not leave Rachel. The pale-blue shirt had a crease across the chest from the way he had been hiding in his own hallway. "I asked you a question."
"Not like this," Rachel said. Her voice was hoarse, scraped. It was not the answer. It was a request for a different room, a different decade, a different sequence of lights. "Jason, I didn't know you were — I didn't know any of you were —"
"You knew enough to bring him through the front door." He nodded, once, toward Andre, without granting him a name. "You knew enough to tell him the night was his."
Andre stood with his empty hands visible, a posture he had learned in rooms where Black men did not get to be ambiguous. The green sweater was too fine for what the evening had become. He glanced at Sophie in Megan's arms and then at Jason, and he kept his tone level, almost formal, the consultant's voice he used when a meeting had gone past the agenda into somebody's life.