Leah had spent the drive from her Midtown apartment rehearsing patience. She had a client review due Friday, a hospital network vulnerability assessment that was consuming most of her working hours, and she had genuinely not wanted to spend an evening defending her existence to a man she had met exactly twice. But her mother had asked, and Leah had learned that needing things from Denise tended to be an asymmetric arrangement. Denise needed Leah when she wanted an audience for her happiness. Leah needed Denise and found mostly careful management.
She arrived with wine, dressed appropriately, said the right things to the right people. Marjorie hugged her immediately and without reservation, in the way Marjorie always did — no calculation, no waiting to see how the room was arranged — which was the one reliable comfort of events like this. Trevor and Kayla were polite in the guarded way of people who knew they were in someone else’s story and were trying not to pick sides. Raymond was a large man in his early sixties with the confidence of someone who had confused volume with authority for so long that the distinction had genuinely ceased to exist for him.