"I didn't."
"I know that too." Patricia stared at the brick, at the paper, at the number she had not earned the right to touch. "Saturday. What time."
"I don't know yet. They'll email. The coach says there's an interview if they keep me. They'll ask if anyone at home supports the schedule."
The sentence landed. Patricia felt it in the place where she kept the red envelopes. Support was not a feeling. Support was gas, and a morning, and a fee if the scholarship was partial, and a mother who did not call the work a favor in front of the child who had done it.
"I will read the email," she said. "I will not promise a feeling I don't have yet. I will promise not to throw the Saturday away before I understand the cost. That is thinner than you deserve. It is what I can say without lying."
Willa considered it. She was eleven. She was also a person who had practiced stillness. "Okay. Don't make Audrey pay for it. She already thinks she's the receipt."
Patricia let out a breath that might have been a laugh in a kinder year. "She said something like that in the car. You two are not as separate as you perform."
"We're separate enough," Willa said. "She was mean this morning."
"Yes."
"She's still scared."
"Yes." Patricia stood. Her camel coat looked less like armor in the warm lobby and more like a coat. "I have to go back. She will want someone at the door even if she tells me not to hover. Do you want to come, or do you want the coach to take you home."
Willa thought of the pavilion, the perfect shoes, the way Audrey's day had been built like a stage that did not include a sister in canvas. She also thought of a true sentence leaving Audrey's mouth because someone had allowed it.