The cry was not loud at first. It was the wounded, offended cry of a person who had been holding a thing and was no longer holding it. She sat down on the rug because sitting down was what her body did when the world misfired. The white bows trembled. She reached again, this time at Claire's knee, not at the drawer, and Claire stepped back without meaning to, which made the cry find its size.
"Stop," Claire said. "Amara. We are not doing this. It is a picture. Pictures are not people."
Amara did not have the words to argue, which did not make her wrong. She cried with her mouth open and her hands opening and closing on the air. Claire stood over her and felt the heat come up into her own face, the heat she despised because it meant she had been seen by someone who could not even testify. She crouched. The blouse pulled across her shoulders. She put her hands on Amara's arms and felt the small bones move with the sobs.
"You have a family," she said, quieter. "You have a father who is coming up the walk any minute. You have a house. You have me. I cut your apple. I know which bow is yours if it falls. That is a family. A picture is just paper that learned how to hurt people."
Amara cried harder, not at the speech, which passed over her, but at the hands on her arms and the drawer that would not open. From the front of the house came the sound Claire had been both waiting for and hoping to beat: the deadbolt, the particular sigh the front door made in wet weather, Marcus knocking his shoes against the mat because Naomi had trained him to and he had never been given a new instruction.
Claire stood too quickly. She wiped her palms on her skirt. She looked at the wedding frame and saw a fingerprint of her own on the glass and rubbed it with her cuff until the couple on the steps looked clean again. Amara stayed on the rug, crying in the rhythm of someone who has forgotten how to stop.
Marcus's voice came down the hall, tired and ordinary, the voice he used when he was announcing himself to rooms.
"I'm home," he called. "Traffic was a sermon."
He appeared in the doorway with his jacket still on, dark suit darkened further by the rain at the shoulders, blue tie loosened a finger's width. He was thirty-five and looked, in doorways, like a man who had remembered his own height and was trying not to use it. He took in the lamp, the child on the rug, the woman standing too straight beside the dresser. The smile he had brought in from the car failed in stages.
"Why is she crying?"