Paige didn't make any noise. She just sat there with her face against her knees and the birth certificate crumpling in her fist and her whole body shaking, and on the other side of the door her sister, her actual sister, sat and listened to her not make any noise, and didn't say anything else, and didn't leave.
***
Downstairs, Irene was putting on her parka.
It was not yet five. The arrangement said six. But she had looked at the kitchen, at the uneaten pie, at Russ still sitting on the stool with his head down, at Dana standing at the sink with her back to everyone and both hands braced on the counter's edge, and she had known that whatever was going to happen in this house next, it could not happen with her in it.
Dana followed her into the mudroom.
Irene heard her coming and did not turn around. She zipped the parka up to her chin. She found her gloves in the pocket. She looked at the coat rack with its seven hooks, and at the empty one at the end, the bent one, and at the beige jacket still lying on the floor where Lucy had dropped it.
"I want you to know," Dana said behind her, "that I would do it again."
Irene turned around.
Dana was standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed tight over her olive-green shirt. Her face was blotched and swollen, and her careful barrette had slid halfway out, and she looked, Irene thought, ten years older than she had at two o'clock.
"Not all of it," Dana said. "Not the pictures. I shouldn't have stopped the pictures. I know that. I knew it then. But the rest of it. Keeping her. Being her mother. I'd do it again. I want you to know that I'm not sorry for that part, so you don't think I'm sorry for the wrong thing."
"I believe you," Irene said. "That's the worst of it, Dana. I believe you mean every word."
"She's my daughter."
"She is," Irene said. "She's your daughter. I never said she wasn't. Winnie never said she wasn't. You know what Winnie said, the last time she and I talked about it? A month before the ice. She said, Mom, at least she has a mother who loves her. At least I know that. She said, Dana might hate me, but she loves my girl. She said that was the only thing that let her sleep." Irene pulled on one glove, finger by finger. "She was counting the days until Paige turned eighteen. But she would have asked you first. That's who she was."
Dana's mouth trembled. "You don't know that."
"No," Irene agreed. "I don't. Neither do you. That's what you took. You took knowing."