“We’re the sitting,” Lila said.
Ana’s throat closed. She kissed the child’s hair. Diego finished the last page even though it was already finished. The lamp was the same lamp. The window was the same window. The driveway beyond the glass held only the Honda, a dark shape in the rain, theirs.
Lila yawned.
“Hat off,” she said to no one, a leftover phrase, and then laughed because no one was wearing a hat.
They laughed with her.
It was a small sound.
It fit in the townhouse.
It did not erase a luxury logo or a sweatband or a sentence about work. It did not need to erase. It needed to exist beside those things, on a Thursday, with a library book and a child who thought sitting was the name of a family.
Diego looked at Ana over Lila’s head.
Ana looked back.
The look was not the first cookout. It was not the porch of a black car. It was the look of two people who had been told the truth by a five-year-old and were still, on this rainy evening, on the same sofa.
He picked Lila up to carry her to bed.
Ana took the book.
The hallway was short.
The hands were empty of keys.
The night, for once, asked nothing more of them than the ordinary work of putting a child down and turning off a lamp and listening to rain that did not have to mean a man was coming.
It only meant rain.
They could live with rain.
They could live with rain.