“So, Maya,” Eleanor began, passing the peas with the precision of a surgeon handing over a scalpel. “How is Michael ?”

She thought of her divorce settlement. The small nest egg she’d hidden from Michael. The down payment on a future she’d been planning alone.

“Forty,” he said into her hair. “I’ll figure out the rest.”

—the youngest, the wild card, the one their father had called “a beautiful accident”—arrived last, smelling of airport whiskey and defiance. He’d been living in Berlin, running a gallery that may or may not have been a money-laundering front. No one asked. No one wanted the answer.

He hugged her. It was awkward and desperate, the way real things often are.

Maya’s smile didn’t waver. “Busy. Work trip.”