He said her name as if it might still belong to the woman he had married, as if the pronunciation itself could return the room to the surprise he had paid for in secret texts and a bakery order and a lie he had told her about Cheyenne. The question was small. It filled the house.
Sophie looked from her father to her mother. The card trembled. Her voice was smaller than the shout had been and more terrible.
"Mommy?"
Andre did not move toward her and did not move toward the door. The confidence had gone out of his face so completely that he looked, for a second, younger than he was. Dark eyes on Rachel, not on the husband, because the betrayal he understood first was the one aimed at the story she had given him. The bottle hung useless at his side.
"You said he was away."
Jason heard that. Of course he heard it. The sentence was not loud, but it was shaped like a fact, and facts were what he trusted when rooms went wrong. His gaze settled on Andre with a steadiness that was worse than a shout. The stubble, the rolled sleeves, the body of a man who still played pickup basketball on Saturdays with his brother and still believed, until this minute, that his marriage was a place he could come home early to.
"Who is he?"