The room emptied with the speed of people who recognize a situation that has changed entirely and want to be elsewhere before it changes further. The woman with the etched glass set it on the end table. The man from the sofa muttered that it was not worth it and moved toward the door. Within two minutes the living room held only Eleanor, and Megan, and the particular silence of a space that has been asked to accommodate something it was not designed for and has been released from that obligation.
Megan stood in the center of the room.
“You’re overreacting,” she said, but the conviction that had been in her voice before was absent now, and the absence was noticeable.
Eleanor walked to the small desk by the hallway door. She had put the folder there three weeks earlier, after the conversation with her attorney, and she had known then that she might need it sooner than she had planned. She opened the drawer and took it out.
Megan’s eyes moved to it.
“What is that?”
“Something I was going to give to Robert next week,” Eleanor said. “But the timing seems reasonable now.”
She slid a single sheet from the folder and held it up.