"You will tell me tonight," Elena said. "Not tomorrow. Not when Sofia is asleep and you have had time to invent a softer story. Tonight. Or I will assume the story that every wife assumes when a child's mouth opens and a stranger's perfume falls out."
Marco nodded once. He looked older than forty in that moment, the burgundy sweatshirt suddenly like a costume for a man who no longer recognized himself.
"Let me put her to bed first," he said. "Then I will tell you what I can."
"What you can," Elena repeated. "There it is again. The careful language of a man editing the truth."
She carried the towels upstairs without waiting for his reply. On the landing she paused, perfume bottle still in her left hand, and pressed her forehead briefly against the wall. The scent rose again—jasmine, violet, a sweetness that had once meant celebration. She remembered wrapping the bottle in tissue paper. She remembered a younger voice laughing and saying, You didn't have to, Lena, this is too much. She remembered believing that love between sisters could survive anything.
She put the perfume high on her dresser, behind a jewelry box, where Sofia could not reach it. Then she helped her daughter out of the trailing pink cardigan, hung the sparkly necklace on the little hook shaped like a moon, and listened while Sofia explained, with great seriousness, that grown-up clothes made her feel like a queen who could also still play with dinosaurs.
Marco read the story. Elena stood in the doorway and watched his mouth form the words, watched Sofia's eyelids grow heavy, watched the ordinary tenderness of their bedtime ritual and felt, for the first time in years, like a guest in her own house. When Sofia finally slept, mouth open, one braid coming loose against the pillow, Elena and Marco returned downstairs without speaking.