Rachel's hands rose, not to Andre, not to Sophie, but into the air between herself and her husband, palms open, coat sleeves falling back from her wrists. The excitement was gone. The nervousness had become something naked. She could feel her mother watching. She could feel her father not watching, which was worse. She could feel Sophie.
"Jason, please. Just let me explain."
Carol Brennan made a sound that was not quite her daughter's name and not quite a refusal. The pearls clicked when she brought a hand to her throat. She had driven down from Boulder with a salad she would never serve and a speech about eleven years that she would never give. Her voice, when it came, was the voice she had used when Rachel was sixteen and the car had come home with a new dent and a worse story.
"Rachel… what have you done?"
Andre set the sparkling water on the edge of the marble island as if the island were neutral ground. The bottle knocked once, softly, against stone. He looked at the child in the pink cardigan and something in his face flinched, a decency arriving too late to be anything but visible. He was not a man who had planned to be a scene. He had planned to be a secret with a door that locked.
"I'm going to leave."