"Take off the coat, honey," Dana said. Her voice had dropped back down to its normal register, but it was a strained normal, a held normal, like someone carrying a full pot of something across a kitchen. "Just take it off and give it back to Lucy, and we'll all go sit down."
Paige's fingers were on the belt. She didn't remember putting them there. The knot she had tied so carelessly two minutes ago would not come loose; she picked at it and picked at it, and her hands were shaking, which was ridiculous, why were her hands shaking. Finally it gave. She shoved the coat off her shoulders. It caught on her elbows, and she had to wrestle out of one sleeve and then the other, and for a second she was stuck in it, arms pinned behind her, and she made a sound she had not meant to make, a small panicked sound, like an animal.
Then she was out of it, and she was holding it, a heavy armful of green wool, and she did not know what to do with it.
She held it out to Lucy.
Lucy dropped the beige jacket on the floor and took the coat in both arms and held it against her, the way Paige had seen little kids hold a blanket in the pediatrician's waiting room. She did not put it on. She just held it. Her eyes went from Paige to Irene to Dana and back, and Paige could see her working at something, the way you work at a math problem where one of the numbers is wrong.
"Grandma," Lucy said. "What do you mean, her mother."
Irene let out a long breath. For the first time since she had come through the door she looked her age. She bent, slowly, one hand on her knee, and picked up the pie box from the bench.
"Where's your father," she said to Dana.
"He's at the yard. They've got the plow trucks out." Dana's hand had gone to her throat, to the top button of her shirt, as if checking it was still fastened. "Irene. Please. Let me call him. Let me call him and we'll—we'll talk about this properly. Like adults. Not in front of—"
"In front of who?" Irene said. "They're who it's about."
She walked past Dana into the kitchen with her boots still on, leaving wet prints across the tile that Dana would normally have had a mop on in ninety seconds. Paige heard her set the pie box down on the counter. Heard the cardboard flaps being folded back. Heard, of all things, a drawer opening, and the clink of a pie server being taken out, as if this were any Saturday, as if somebody were going to want pie.
Dana stood in the mudroom for a moment longer. She looked at Paige then, finally. Her face was pale under her makeup and her eyes were very bright.
"I'm calling your dad," she said. "Don't—just don't go anywhere. Okay? Either of you."
She went past them toward the den, pulling her phone out of her back pocket. Paige heard her say, "Russ," and then, lower, "No, you need to come home. Now. Irene's here. She—" and then a door closed.
Paige and Lucy stood alone in the mudroom.
The snow kept ticking on the glass. The boots kept standing in their row. On the floor between them lay the beige car-wash jacket, crumpled, and the pencil was still under the boot tray, and Paige's heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.