He was fourteen and she had spent two years watching him and taking notes.
"I'm not going to do anything stupid in the next ten minutes," he said again, quieter. "I'm going to think. Come inside in a little while. There are people - there's someone I want you to meet." He paused. "Dad's friend. From Yale. He drove down from Greenwich."
Lily lifted her head. "What's his name?"
"Ashford. Richard Ashford. He seems - just come inside when you're ready."
He gave her shoulder a brief, careful press. Then he stood and went back inside.
Lily sat in the cold for another few minutes, her father's nursery rhyme turning in her head without sound, and then she straightened her dress, brushed the dead leaves from her tights, and went in.
The living room was warm and close and smelled of the casseroles that the church women had organized - chicken and mushroom, something with green beans, the desserts covered in plastic wrap on the kitchen table. The guests were doing what guests did at these things: speaking in half-voices, forming and reforming small clusters, reaching for food they weren't hungry for because eating gave you something to do with your hands.
Lily worked her way through the room slowly, staying near the walls. She was good at being near the walls. She had developed this skill over the past two years at Calvin's house, where the margins were safer than the center.
She spotted Ethan by the fireplace, standing with a couple she didn't recognize.
They were the most visibly out-of-place people in the room, though not in any way she could have easily explained. They wore the right clothes - dark, appropriate, conservative. They held their glasses correctly. They said the right things to the people who spoke to them. But they carried themselves with the particular ease of people who are not auditioning for their position in a room; they simply occupied it. The man was tall, early fifties, with a face that suggested things did not happen to him so much as through him. The woman beside him was elegant in the way that only happens when elegance stops being effort - fine bone structure, pearl earrings, good posture that looked like the absence of bad posture rather than the presence of deliberate effort.
Their car was the black Mercedes in the driveway. Lily had noticed it when they arrived.
Sandra was already orbiting them with the attentive efficiency of a woman who had identified the highest-value target in the room.
"-so good of you to come all this way, Richard," Sandra was saying as Lily approached, her voice in its good-company register. "Dennis would have been so touched. He spoke about you, you know, over the years-"
"I should have visited," the man - Richard - said. His voice was quiet and unhurried. "That's a regret I'll have for a long time."
He looked up and saw Lily.
He crossed the room to her, hand extended. He shook hands with her like she was a person, not a child - straight, firm, brief. "You must be Lily. I'm Richard Ashford. Your father and I were at Yale together. I'm very sorry."