Lily swallowed. “Far enough that I stopped hoping I was wrong.”
Ava nodded, a ghastly practical nod, the firstborn arranging facts while her life left the room. She looked at Ryan. “Did you know?”
His delay was the answer. Then he said, “She told me last week.”
“Last week,” Ava said. “So you sat in our car. You sat in our bed. You sat here tonight and you carved chicken.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? At dessert? On our anniversary? At the baptism?”
Lily said, “Ava, please.”
“Please what? Please be graceful? Please be Diane? Pass the bread and keep the room pretty?”
Saying her mother’s name put a strange current through the air. They all felt it. Diane was late. Diane was expected. Diane’s empty chair was not only empty. It was incoming.
Ryan heard it too. His eyes went to the hall again. The front of the house was still. The runner lay straight. The mirror held a slice of chandelier and the dark-green line of Ava’s shoulder.
Ava followed his glance and misunderstood it, which was reasonable. She thought he feared Diane’s judgment. She thought he feared the mother-in-law who had once passed him the bread as a blessing. She did not yet have the wider frame the night intended to give her.
“You should fear her,” Ava said. “She made this table. She made us. You sat in her house and did this.”
Ryan went paler than the accusation required. At the time Ava took that paleness as ordinary cowardice.