That was not an ordinary sentence.
Ava leaned in a little. The dark-green dress made a soft sound against the chair. Her chestnut waves slid forward and she pushed them back with two fingers, a gesture so familiar to the men and women of her life that they would have recognized her from the hand alone. Her blue-gray eyes did not blink as often as they should have.
“Lily,” she said. “You’ve been weird all week. You were weird at the grocery store. You’re weird now. You keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
Ava looked at her sister’s hand. Lily looked down as if surprised to find it there, on her own body, guarding what could no longer be guarded by silence.
Ryan said, “Maybe we should just eat.”
Ava did not look at him when she answered. “You can eat.”
He sat back. The rolled sleeves of the black shirt exposed his forearms, and Ava had the unhelpful thought that she still liked his forearms. The mind does that in the seconds before a fall. It grabs a familiar object. It tries to nail the room to the floor.
Lily’s hazel eyes filmed over. She tried to smile and produced only a tremble. “I didn’t want to do this at dinner.”
“Do what at dinner?” Ava asked.
The candles popped, one tiny wet snap. Outside a car went down the street and did not stop. The house remained an upper-middle-class suburban house at night: warm, elegant, and suddenly much smaller than its square footage.
Ava’s voice lost the last of its social softness. It did not become loud. It became exact.
“Lily… what aren’t you telling me?”