There were not two bottles of white in the door now. There was one, and it was nearly empty. An inch of pale gold liquid sloshed in the bottom of it as the door swung. And beside it, half hidden behind the carton of oat milk, stood a plastic bottle of Smartwater, the tall kind, with the label on it, cap screwed on tight, three-quarters full of something perfectly clear.
Emery did not drink Smartwater. He thought it was a scam. He said so, at length, every time he saw it in a store, to anyone who would listen.
He reached in and took it out. His hand was very steady. He unscrewed the cap, and he did not need to bring it to his nose, because the smell came up to meet him, sharp and medicinal and unmistakable, the smell of every frat party he had ever been to and every bad night he had ever had in his twenties, the smell of a thing that has no smell at all except to the people who are looking for it.
He screwed the cap back on. He set it on the counter. He set it down gently, the way he had set down the snow globe, as though it might break, as though it were something that could hurt someone if he were careless with it, and it occurred to him, in some far-off part of his brain, that this was exactly correct.
Then he turned around.
Noelle had not moved. She was still sitting at the table with her hands flat on the wood, and she was looking at the bottle on the counter, and her face had done something he had seen it do only once before, two and a half years ago, in a holding room at the Lititz Borough police station at nine o'clock on a Wednesday morning. It had come apart. Not dramatically. There was no sobbing, no crumpling. It was more as if the face had been held together by something like wire, very fine, invisible, and the wire had simply been cut, and everything it had been holding up had settled a quarter inch.
"Emery," she said.
He realized he could smell it on her now. He had been smelling it since he came in. Under the mint. She had brushed her teeth—of course she had brushed her teeth, she was a hygienist, she had probably brushed for the full two minutes—and there was mouthwash under that, and there was the lavender lotion she used on her hands after work because the gloves dried them out, and under all of it, faint and sweet and rotten, was the grape juice.
"How long," he said.
She looked at Linnea. She looked at him. "Not in front of her."
"How long, Noelle?"