He had barely noticed her at twenty-seven either, when his parents had introduced them at the estate Christmas party and something in her eyes had apparently registered to him as useful. She had been finishing her master's in art history at Columbia. He had been looking for a wife in the way that certain kinds of men decided, periodically, that they needed to acquire something - not because they wanted it desperately, but because the timeline called for it.
She had said yes. She had told herself it was enough - that she could make enough for both of them.
She had believed that for almost two years.
"Ava's running a slight fever," she said now. "Not enough to cancel dance, but I'll keep an eye on it."
He looked up from his phone. His gray eyes - silver-gray, the color of lake water in November - moved to her face with an attention that felt, as it always did, like being examined rather than looked at. "Should she be going to dance if she has a fever?"
"It's ninety-nine point one. She'll be fine if she rests this afternoon."
He considered this for exactly the amount of time it took to decide he could trust her judgment on this and then returned to his phone. "Okay."
That was the word he used most often with her. Okay. Neutral, functional, consuming nothing. She had spent years reading the spaces around it, listening for the slight variations - okay meaning I trust you, okay meaning stop talking, okay meaning I forgot you were there until just now.
She could tell them all apart now. She was fluent in the language of his indifference.
"I made your suit the Brioni," she said. "You have the dinner tonight."
"I know." He glanced at the valet stand through the bedroom door. Something almost softened in his expression - a recognition, or something near it. "That's - yeah. Good."
Lily turned back to the counter so he wouldn't see her face.
Even now. Even after she had learned not to expect anything. A half-formed sentence of acknowledgment still did something to the bruised soft center of her she couldn't quite seem to harden up. That was her failure, she supposed. She had never quite managed to stop hoping.
Ava woke at seven with her hair at full catastrophe and a demand for waffles that she expressed, at three years old, with remarkable diplomatic clarity: both fists pressed to the table, eyes wide, the word "waffles" delivered as though she were presenting evidence to a jury.
"We have eggs," Lily said.
"Waffles," Ava said, patient and immovable as a small rock.
"Eggs are what's cooked."
Ava considered this. "Eggs with syrup?"
"That's not a thing."
"It could be a thing."
Lily looked at her daughter - the rosebud mouth, the enormous dark eyes that were so exactly her own that Ethan sometimes did a slight double-take when Ava turned them on him - and felt the complicated, inexhaustible love that parenthood had installed in her like a second set of lungs. She could not have predicted this love before it arrived. Nothing had prepared her for it.