"You're not forgiven because you said it clearly," he said. "Clear is late. Clear is still better than the screen door."
"I know."
"I don't know what we are in the morning. I know you are not packing a bag tonight while she is asleep on me, and I know you are not sleeping in this bed as if the drawer was a disagreement about lamps. The guest room is made. You made it. You make everything."
Claire nodded. The nod cost her something he could see in her throat. "Can I put her down? Not as a right. Her neck is at a bad angle."
He hesitated, then shifted Amara into Claire's arms. The transfer was practiced. That practice was part of the truth of the house and part of its injury. Claire held the child with the competence he had married, one hand under the thigh, one under the head, and for a moment the competence looked like love because it was also love, and the two facts did not cancel. She carried Amara to the nursery. He heard the white-noise machine come on, a small false ocean. He heard Claire stand there longer than the settling required. When she came back, her arms were empty and her face was bare of the evening's arrangements.
"The rest of the cards," she said. "I can tell you who sent them. Or you can read them without me in the room. Both are worse in different ways."
"I'll read them," he said. "You can sit in the chair. If you leave, I'll think you're editing the stack."
She sat in the chair by the window. He read on the floor, card after card, not performing them, only moving his eyes and sometimes saying a name aloud so it would be in the air: Mrs. Alvarez, the Holt twins' mother, a cousin in Macon he had met once. A few cards were still sealed. He opened them with his thumb. Nothing in them was a revelation except the fact of their having been kept from him, which was revelation enough. People had tried to hand him his dead wife in sentences, and the sentences had lived in the dark with her ring.
At the bottom of the drawer, under a folded scarf he did not remember, he found a paper envelope from the hospital, the kind they give you with discharge instructions. Inside were two photographs the nurse had taken on Amara's first morning, printed badly, Naomi exhausted and brilliant, Marcus in a paper gown he had hated. He had copies in a book. He had not known these existed. Claire, when he held them up, shook her head.