“Mom, this is Emma.”

Yeah, that felt weird. Almost to the point that Carly wished Marcelline had held off telling her. Carly had asked her why she’d changed it, but she said it was a long story for another time.

“It is so nice to meet you, finally,” Donna said.

Carly was worried. Her mother looked exhausted. Tired was okay as long as it didn’t look guilty. Carly wanted Marcelline to believe that her mother hadn’t done anything wrong. She wanted Marcelline to love her mother, which was stupid. But people were careful with what they loved.

Before shaking Donna’s hand, Marcelline pointed vaguely over her shoulder in the direction of the front door and the squall beyond it. “We can thank the weather for running us out of excuses not to finally meet.”

Marcelline took in the foyer in a sweeping glance, pausing on the scrape marks gouged into the drywall, where the curly metal thing had been pulled away and broken.

John rounded the corner into the foyer. In the turn, his expression erased—from a man who was mildly interested in what he’d overheard from the kitchen to a blank that Carly found difficult to believe, much less make sense of. She’d never seen him like that. She’d never seen anybody like that.

It didn’t have the slackness of sleep, but every muscle under his skin was without inflection. Perfectly balanced in absence. As if he’d been unplugged.

It didn’t seem to affect Marcelline. She smiled at him, but her eyes sparkled with purpose when John came into the room. Carly wished that Marcelline was better at playing as if everything were fine. It was a little too close to the line. Marcelline lit up and was not trying hard enough, by Carly’s measure, to keep from letting on that she knew anything was wrong. She was being a little weird.

How could Carly be the best one at this kind of thing? She’d thought Em—Marcelline would have been a little bit smoother than that. The air was buzzing around her.

Marcelline started across the foyer, hand extended, jacket dripping. “You must be, John, is it?”

He nodded and a prefab polite expression twitched into his face. “Yep. Hi.”

“It’s nice to meet you. After all this time.”

Donna went into hostess mode. “Emma, we were just about to open a bottle of wine. Won’t you join us and wait out the rain a little?”

Marcelline looked back to Carly and her mother and answered quickly, but straight to John, “I’d love to.”

Donna smiled, welcoming the distraction of something nice and normal, Carly knew. And it would seem nice and normal if Emma could just keep it together. “Great! Let me just hang up your coat.”