She thought: he will ask me. Watch? And I will have to say: soon.
She could not say soon to him again. She found that she could not. Not tonight.
"All right," she said.
He looked at her.
"All right," Solange said. "I will open it. Not because you are right. Because it is getting wet." She took a breath. "And you will hold the light still for me. And you will not touch it until I say."
Conor held the light still.
He had held a light for a lot of things in nineteen years: paramedics working on a man in a ditch, a mother going through her son's car for the thing she already knew she would find. He had learned to hold it the way you hold your breath, so that the circle on the ground did not shake, and he held it that way now, on the flat gray capstone of a stone wall on Ridge Road, while a woman in a wet coat untied a piece of red-and-white string with fingers that had gone stiff in the cold.
She did not hurry. She worked the knot loose with her thumbnail, the way his mother used to work loose the knots on the bakery boxes from Martine's in Katonah, and when it came free she wound the string around two fingers into a neat little coil and put it in her coat pocket. She did not tear the brown paper. She folded it back along its creases, one end and then the other, and under it was a white cardboard box, and she lifted the lid of that, and inside, nested in crumpled tissue, there was a small blue box with a hinged lid, and taped to the top of the blue box there was a paper tag, the old-fashioned kind, manila, with a reinforced hole and a loop of thread.
He read it because it was in his light. He could not have not read it.