The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.
Then Ottoline said, in a very small voice, "Why would you do our laundry at their house?"
And Hesper, still holding my son's hand, looked at her mother and said, "Because I've been his girlfriend for a year and a half, and he was the only person I could ask."
I have seen a lot of people go pale. It's part of my job. I've watched people go pale when a needle goes in and when a doctor says a word like metastatic, and once I watched a grown man go gray as ash because he'd just realized he left his wedding ring in a hospital gown that had already gone down the laundry chute. Paleness is not one thing. There's the pale of fear and the pale of nausea and the pale of shock, and there's a particular pale I've only seen a few times, which is the pale of a person discovering that the story they have been telling themselves about their own life has a whole room in it they didn't know was there.
That was the pale that came over Ottoline Vandersloot in my kitchen.
It started at her mouth, at that little thread at the corner, and went out from there. She didn't move. Her hands stayed flat on the leather folio. But the color drained out of her face so completely that for a second I actually stood up, the nurse in me getting ahead of the rest of me, ready to put a hand on her back and her head between her knees.
"A year and a half," she said.
"Since March of sophomore year," Hesper said. "Chemistry lab. Mr. Strickwell put us together for the titration unit because we were the only two people who had both done the pre-lab."