Thomas smiled and said something pleasant and forgettable. And inside his chest, something began to turn slowly, like a key.
He didn't sleep that night. He lay in the dark and did what he did best, which was assemble small facts into a shape:
Fact: Emma's dress had been sized for a smaller girl, and it hung on her anyway.
Fact: He had not seen his daughter eat a meal in front of him in months because he was never home for meals.
Fact: Noah, his son, eighteen months old, had not once cried for attention in the two hours Thomas had been in the house. Babies cry. That's the entire job description.
At 2:00 in the morning, he went into the nursery and lifted his son out of the crib, and the wrongness of it hit him in the stomach. Noah weighed nothing. He was light the way a bird is light.
When Thomas carried him down to the kitchen and made a bottle, the baby drank like a man rescued from a desert: both fists clamped on the plastic, whimpering between swallows as if he expected it to be taken away. Children do not eat like that in houses with full pantries.
Thomas sat on the kitchen floor at 3:00 in the morning, holding his son, and understood that he had been living inside a lie so well-built that he had helped construct it. But understanding is not proof. And Thomas Hartley had spent twenty years learning the difference.
The next morning, he made breakfast himself: eggs, toast, orange juice. The kind of simple food a man who has never cooked can manage without embarrassing himself.
Emma came to the doorway and stopped there, reading the room before entering it.
"Come sit, sweetheart."