"Hey," he said. "So. I was going to talk to you before you got back."
"You changed the lock."
"I had Erik swap the cylinder this morning. It's not personal, Nor. It's just time."
"It's her birthday."
"I know it's her birthday." He rubbed the back of his neck. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders from fifteen years of hauling joists and porch columns, and he had the kind of face people trusted at once, open and freckled, a face made for apologizing to customers about weather delays. "That's kind of why. People are coming at two. Brooke's folks are driving up from Hudson. I didn't want it to be weird."
"So you put my things in the snow."
"It wasn't snowing when I put them out."
She looked at him. He had the grace to glance away.
"I'll get you a motel for a couple nights," he said. "The one on London Road, it's decent. I'll pay for it. And we'll figure out a visiting thing. Sundays, maybe. You can still be Auntie Nora. Nobody's saying you can't be Auntie Nora."
"Daniel, I've put her to bed every night for a year."
"And we're grateful." He said we the way Brooke said it now. "Seriously. Everybody knows what you did. But she needs a family that looks like a family. She needs to not be confused about who her mom is."
"Her mom," Nora said, "is my sister."
Something flickered across his face then, quick and ugly, and was gone. "Her mom is in Rochester doing crafts in a group home," he said quietly. "And the person who's going to be here every morning is Brooke. That's just the reality. I'm sorry it's hard."
Behind him, through the gap in the door, Nora could hear Linnea starting to fuss, the low, rising complaint that meant she had dropped the teething ring and could not reach it. Nora's body moved toward the sound before her mind caught up, a half step, a lean, the way it had moved ten thousand times since last October. Daniel shifted his weight and filled the gap.
"I've got her," he said.
"She dropped her ring. She'll want the cold one from the freezer, not the—"
"Nora. I've got her."
He went inside. The lock clicked. She stood on the porch beside her suitcases with snow melting into the shoulders of her coat, and after a moment she brushed the snow off the gray roller with her sleeve, because it seemed like the kind of thing a sane woman would do, and then she sat down on the porch swing next to the cake and tried to work out how to breathe.