He came in. Jack locked the door again with a click that sounded final and not final enough. The pendant lamps suddenly felt too bright, exposing every paper turkey, every red vinyl stool, every soft thing that had made the last day and a half feel like a life. Claire introduced everyone with the brittle courtesy of someone walking a frozen pond and listening for cracks. Peter shook Jack's hand too firmly, the handshake of sales and certainty. He called Mae "ma'am" in a way that made Mae's eyes narrow behind her round glasses into slits of assessment. He accepted coffee poured by Jack and did not drink it, which Mae noticed and filed under Crimes Against Hospitality.
"You left without saying where," Peter said to Claire, lowering his voice as if privacy could be purchased by volume control in a room with excellent acoustics and a grandmother who missed nothing. "Your mother opened the carbon copy of the letter she sent you—she keeps carbons, of course—and decided you needed intervening before you did something regrettable. I volunteered. We care about you, Claire. That's all this is."
"You care about the story of me," Claire said. She kept her hands around her own empty mug so they would not shake. "There's a difference. The story looks good at dinners. The actual me keeps driving into blizzards."
Jack busied himself at the grill, giving them space that was not really space, the courtesy of a man who knew when to pretend the stainless steel needed polishing. Mae retreated to the pass-through and watched like a hawk that had put on a floral apron for camouflage.