For a moment, nobody in the room moved. Julian's eyes went to the crib, to the sleeping baby's face, to details he had somehow never let himself examine too closely in two years of fatherhood — the shape of her eyes, the small crescent birthmark on her left wrist that he'd always assumed came from somewhere in his own family tree. Renata's practiced smile was still on her face when he turned to look at her — the same reassuring, faintly indulgent smile she always wore when smoothing over Julian's doubts. But it was already beginning to falter at the edges, the way ice does the instant before it cracks. "Julian, don't listen to her," Renata started, "she's grieving, she's confused about Camille, she's been saying things like this for—" She stopped. Julian's eyes had lifted from the crib to meet hers, and whatever he found there made the last of her smile disappear entirely. His eyes had gone bloodshot, red-rimmed, in a way she had never once seen in two years of marriage — not from crying, but from something closer to a dam breaking somewhere behind them. "Julian," Renata said again, and this time her voice had lost its practiced warmth entirely, replaced by something thin and afraid. "Julian, whatever you're thinking—" His breathing had changed. Gone heavy, distorted, dragged in through his teeth like a man trying to hold something back that had already gotten too large to contain.