“Thank you for letting me come.”

“I did it for them,” Claire said. “Not for you.”

“I know,” he said, and nodded, and left. And she noticed that the answer didn’t wound him the way it once would have; he had stopped needing her forgiveness in order to keep showing up, which was, she thought, the first genuinely unselfish thing she’d seen from him in a very long time.

At midnight, Zoe lifted her glass of juice to make her wish. “I want everybody to stay healthy,” she announced, “and for nobody to ever leave, and for us to get a cat.”

“The cat,” Claire said, “will be negotiated separately,” and the whole room laughed.

But Claire heard the middle part of the wish, the way a mother hears the thing underneath the thing.