The smell hit her first. Perfume and beer and something fried, a combination that sat in the air of her living room with the confidence of something that belonged there. Her sofa held three strangers. Two more people leaned against her kitchen cabinets with drinks in their hands. A man she had never seen had his feet up on her coffee table, and the gesture was so casually proprietorial that Eleanor stood in the doorway and simply looked at him until she had processed exactly what the gesture meant. A wet towel had been draped across the back of a dining chair.
She stepped into the room.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The noise absorbed it without acknowledgment. She moved two more steps in.
“Excuse me,” she said again, with slightly more weight in the words.
A few heads turned.
And then Megan appeared from the kitchen doorway, already smiling, moving through the room with the ease of someone who had been hostessing in this space long enough to have forgotten it was not hers.
“Oh, Eleanor! You’re early.”
Eleanor let the word sit between them for a moment.
“I live here,” she said.