Claire had an answer ready. She had had it ready before he asked, which was its own small confession.
"She got upset over an old picture."
Marcus looked at Amara, who had twisted toward his voice and was crying at him now, because he was the other person in the house who sometimes fixed things by picking them up. He looked at the dresser. He saw the wedding. He had walked past that dresser every night since April and had stopped letting his eyes land. Tonight the top of it was wrong in a way he could not yet name, the way a word is wrong when someone has replaced it with a cousin.
"Where did it go?" he said.
Amara dragged in a breath that shook her whole chest. She pointed at the top drawer, finger steady even while the rest of her was not.
"Mommy inside."
The rain ticked at the window. The brass lamp hummed, or seemed to. Marcus set his keys on the corner of the dresser, carefully, as if the wood were listening. He did not look at Claire yet. He got down on one knee, the suit creasing, and put his hand on the drawer pull. It stuck where it always stuck. He worked it open.
The frame lay face-down on the envelopes, glass against paper. He turned it over. Naomi laughed up at him with her mouth half open, the baby in yellow glaring at the camera like a citizen with a complaint. A hospital bracelet, the kind with soft plastic and a snap, had slid out from under the stack when the drawer moved. The name on it was not Amara's. He saw his wife's handwriting on a folded sheet beneath the frame, the particular slope of her N, and he saw envelopes addressed to him in a script he knew from thank-you notes and from a voice on the phone he had been too tired to return. He lifted the frame. He did not stand. From the floor, with the drawer open beside his knee and his daughter crying into the rug, he looked up at the woman he had married in April.
"What else did you put in here?"
Claire's hand rose halfway to her throat and stopped, because there was nothing at her throat to arrange. The wedding frame watched them all from the dresser top, two people on courthouse steps, squinting into a brightness that had not lasted.