Simone looked at the money. She didn't reach for it.
"Take it," Lorraine said. Her voice came out wrong, too high. "Simone. Take it. It's yours."
Simone took it. She did it the way you take something from a dog you aren't sure about, quick, fingers only, without stepping any closer than she had to. She did not count it. Calvin knew she wanted to; he could see her want to. She held it folded in her fist against her stomach.
Then she bent down and picked up the sticky note off the rug, the one that said *186. Need 54.* She brushed the white dust off it with her thumb.
Lorraine watched her do it. "Simone," she said. "Baby—"
It was the wrong word. Calvin saw it land. Lorraine saw it too; he watched her hear herself. She had never called Simone baby, not in years. Baby was Micah's word. It had been Micah's word since the day he was born.
Simone picked up her backpack off the floor. She picked up her math workbook from the sofa, and her choir folder, and her pencil case, and the bruised banana, and the unsigned permission slip, and she put them back one by one in the order they went, with the care of someone packing to leave a place. She put the money and the note back in the cat pouch, and zipped the cat pouch, and put the cat pouch in the front pocket, and zipped the front pocket. Then she zipped the main compartment. Then she put the backpack on, both straps, and pulled them tight.
"Can I go to my room now," she said. Not a question. Not to either of them.
"Simone," Calvin said.
She went. Calvin heard her on the stairs, slower than Micah, her school shoes deliberate on each tread. He heard her door. He heard, very faintly, the click of the lock he had put on her door himself in June, after the seven dollars, a cheap push-button lock that only worked from the inside, the lock Lorraine had said an eleven-year-old didn't need.
Then it was just him and his wife and the broken vase and the light going orange in the window where the vase had been.
***
They did not fight in the living room. Some instinct sent them both into the kitchen, away from the stairs, the way they had learned to do when the children were small and every raised voice traveled up through the vents. Lorraine stood at the sink with her back to him. Calvin stood by the refrigerator. Neither of them turned on the overhead light, so they had only the bulb over the stove, yellow and weak.
"How long," Lorraine said, "have you had that on your phone."
"Since I put the camera in."