Mrs. Parker said. It was barely a question.
Claire nodded. “At 4:30.”
Mrs. Parker stepped aside. “Come in.”
Dawn came slowly through the kitchen window, turning the glass from black to gray to a pale, washed-out blue. Claire sat at the table with her son in the crook of her arm while Mrs. Parker moved around the kitchen with the quiet efficiency of someone who had handled more than one emergency at an unusual hour. She warmed a bottle and set it on the table beside Claire’s hand. She put a coffee cup next to it, a paper sleeve cup from the stack she kept near the machine, the kind she brought out when someone needed something to hold without having to think about why.
“Walk me through it,” she said, sitting across the table with a yellow legal pad.
Claire told her. All of it. The dinner she
