Then, because she was eighteen and a valedictorian and had argued in front of judges in four states and was absolutely, entirely done being composed, she stepped forward again, and leaned down, and said into it, much more quietly, looking at the back of the gym where the two of them still stood in the aisle, holding on to each other:
"I wasn't sure which one of you I meant," she said. "When I said it. I've been thinking. I think I meant both."
* * *
What Renee remembered afterward was not the applause, though there was applause, long and ragged and on its feet. She remembered walking. She remembered the length of that center aisle, from the scoreboard to the stage, which she had walked a hundred times for basketball games and band concerts and a winter formal she'd chaperoned, and which had never been so long. She remembered the faces turning on either side, people she'd sold wedding flowers and funeral sprays to for eight years, all of them looking, and some of them crying, and some of them, she could see it, knowing. Small towns keep their secrets until they don't.
She remembered that Dana's hand on her arm was shaking so hard that Renee had to hold it with her other hand to keep it there.
At the front row, Tom had righted his chair. He was standing beside it. When they reached him, he looked at Dana, and Dana looked at him, and Renee, standing between them, watched ten years and seven months pass back and forth across the space of a foot of air without a word in either direction. Then Tom stepped aside.
Dana sat down in the fifth chair. She took the taped card out of the pocket of her rain shell, wet and green and crooked, and laid it on her knee.
Renee sat beside her, in the chair that said her own name with nothing after it, and found that for the first time in eight years she did not mind at all.
Jess Tran gave her speech; Renee could not have repeated a word of it under oath. The names were read, all two hundred and eleven, and when they got to the L's Ingrid stood up in her navy coat and clapped over her head like a woman at a ballgame, and Pete whistled through his fingers, and Dana did not clap at all; she just sat with both hands pressed flat over the card on her knee and watched her daughter cross the stage, and Renee thought that she had never seen a person look at anything that way, not ever, not even herself, at the first ultrasound, the one that had been the good one, before it wasn't.
Then the caps went up. Then it was over.