I held back.
Some things didn't need words. They didn't need the looking. They just needed the hand, in the dark under the table, warm and certain and not going anywhere.
After dinner, in the corridor, Margaret stopped me.
She had Isolde against her shoulder — Isolde in the particular mode she entered in the early evening, the settled, warm mode, the one that meant she was considering sleep. Margaret held her with the practiced ease of someone who had been holding babies for sixty years and still found it remarkable every time.
"She did that," Margaret said. "With Eleanor."
"Yes," I said.
"I've known Eleanor for forty-three years," Margaret said. "I have never seen anyone do that. Hold her face." She looked at me. "Isolde looked at her as if she had — found something. Something she w
