“Since we’re all already here, I’m sure you don’t mind. We thought we’d make use of the place rather than let it sit empty again.”
Megan
Eleanor looked past her at the faces she did not know, at the shoes piled near her door, at the sand tracked across her floors, at the glass in a woman’s hand that she recognized as one of a set she had bought at an estate sale in 2019 because the etching on the side reminded her of Henry’s handwriting.
She looked back at Megan.
“Ask them to leave,” she said.
The room went quiet in pieces, the way a sound dies unevenly across a space.
Megan blinked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Ask them to leave,” Eleanor said. “This is not your house.”
The man with his feet on the coffee table brought them down to the floor. Someone in the kitchen turned the music down. A woman near the window looked at her phone with the focused attention of someone deciding whether to be somewhere else.
Megan’s smile thinned to something less comfortable.
“Oh, come on. Don’t make this into something it isn’t. It’s one weekend, and honestly—”