to you about the twins?”
Karen was quiet long enough that I looked at Daniel. He had stopped working.
“She talks about them all the time,” Karen said. “Mostly Leo.”
“How?”
“Like he is already part of the Sterling family in a way that is different from Luna.”
Daniel straightened in his chair.
I kept my voice even. “What does that mean?”
Karen turned off the water. “She keeps saying there will be a place for him with us. She says the family needs to stay involved.”
“Did she ask you to do anything?”
“Not exactly.”
That answer stayed between us.
“What did she ask you to do?”
Karen gave a short laugh that had no humor in it. “She said there would be a private family discussion after the delivery.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Who is supposed to be there?”
“My mother. Me. You, I guess.”
“And Leo?”
Karen did not answer.
Daniel reached for a pencil and rolled it between his fingers.
I said, “Karen?”
“She talks as if the babies are already assigned places,” Karen said. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
I wrote that down on the back of an envelope.
“Did Vivian tell you why she wants this discussion?”
“No.”
The pencil stopped in Daniel’s hand.
I asked, “Did she tell you to bring anything?”
“No.”
“Then please call me if she gives you a time or place.”
“I will.”
I started to thank her, but Karen spoke first.
“Elena, she is not telling me much either.”
That was the first thing she had said that made the call feel less like an interview and more like a warning.
At one in the afternoon, Karen stood at her kitchen sink with a coffee mug under the faucet when I arrived. She set
the mug upside down on a towel and pulled out a chair for me.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I am.”
She sat across from me and picked up the mug again, although it was already clean.
“What exactly did your mother tell you?”
Karen rubbed a thumb around the handle.
“She said she wanted to talk privately after the babies came.”
“About Leo?”
“Mostly Leo.”
“Why him?”
Karen looked toward the sink.
“I don’t know.”
“Did she use the word family?”
Karen nodded.
“She says that word when she wants something to sound settled.”
Karen put the mug down.
“She also said I should be there because I am his aunt.”
I waited.
“She did not tell me what she expected me to say.”
“Did she ask you to take him anywhere?”
Karen’s eyes lifted quickly.
“No.”
“Did she ask you to meet her somewhere?”
“She said I should
wait at the hospital.”
“When?”
“She said she would tell me.”
I glanced at the folded paper beside her plate.
“What’s that?”
“My parking receipt from yesterday.”
She picked it up and folded it once, then again.
“She told me to keep it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
I let that answer stand.
Karen looked down at the paper. “Elena, I think she has an idea in her head about how this is supposed to go.”
“What idea?”
“She has not told me.”
That was the answer I carried home.
At 5:40, Daniel and I sat at the dining room table with our calendars open between us. He circled Friday’s delivery date and then drew another circle around the time printed beneath it.
“Seven thirty,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at his phone.
“Vivian asked Karen to wait at the hospital.”
I put my pencil down.
“When?”
“She did not
