Behind Daniel, in the hallway, Brooke had appeared, holding a roll of tape and wearing a pink sweater with a gold number one embroidered on the front, a sweater that matched the garland, that matched the balloons. She looked from Daniel to Ruth to Nora, and her lovely face was puzzled and uneasy.
"Dan?" she said. "Is everything okay?"
Nora watched him do the calculation. There was a car pulling up behind Ruth's Buick, a silver SUV with Wisconsin plates. Brooke's parents. There was his mother on the porch, seventy-one years old and four foot eleven in her good boots and not moving one inch. There were the suitcases, which could not be made invisible now, which anyone coming up the steps would have to walk past.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. Come in. It's fine."
Ruth went in. Nora followed her with the cake. As she passed him in the doorway, Daniel said, very low, so only she could hear: "Don't make this a thing."
She didn't answer. She had already seen Linnea, who was sitting in the high chair with a teething ring in her fist—the right one, the cold one, the one from the freezer—and who had looked up at the sound of the door and seen Nora and lit up from the inside like a lamp.
"Noni," Linnea said. "Noni. Noni."
* * *
The party went the way such parties go, which is to say it went loudly and crookedly and everyone pretended.
Brooke's parents were large, cheerful people named Gary and Deb who sold insurance in Hudson. Daniel's brother Erik came with his wife Mandy and their two boys, who were seven and nine and went straight to the basement to find the old Nintendo. Erik had glanced at the suitcases on the way in, and then at Nora, and then at his own feet; it was Erik, Nora remembered, who had swapped out the lock cylinder that morning, and he would not meet her eyes. A couple from the church came, and two of Daniel's old crew guys, and a woman from Brooke's dental practice who brought a cake of her own, so that there were now three cakes: Nora's sheet cake with the sugar loon, Brooke's Costco cake in pink and gold, and the coworker's, which had nothing written on it at all.
Nora sat on the floor of the living room with Linnea and helped her rip open packages. A wooden xylophone. A pair of tiny snow boots. A stuffed moose from Gary and Deb with a tag that said Grandpa and Grandma Love You!, which Deb pointed out twice, laughing, with a look at Brooke that Brooke pretended not to see. Every time Linnea got bored with a present, she crawled back into Nora's lap and settled there with her thumb in her mouth and her other hand fisted in Nora's sweater. Every time she did it, Nora felt Daniel's eyes on her from across the room.