“I’m glad you could make it,” Samantha said smoothly, and Laura, who had never in her life been able to tell the difference between courtesy and love, took it for a welcome and beamed.

She reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek, a gesture for the watching relatives, and then she turned her gaze across the room and found me.

Everything about Laura’s entrance had been staged, I understood, watching it, staged for an audience, calibrated for effect.

The gown too fine for the occasion, the diamonds, the loud declaration of maternal longing pitched to carry, the touch on the cheek performed a half-second too long so the relatives could take it in.

There was not, anywhere in it, a single unguarded moment, a single gesture that seemed meant for Samantha rather than for the watchers.