Part One: Saturday

“So what are you and Logan getting his mom for her birthday?”

I was standing at the kitchen counter in our house in Normal Heights with a coffee in one hand and my car keys already in the other, and it was 7:20 on a Wednesday morning, and my sister-in-law’s question went into me like something cold.

“What birthday?”

There was a pause on the line that lasted about a second and a half, and in that second and a half I knew.

“Saturday,” Paige said.

“The seafood place downtown.

On the harbor.”

“Paige.”

“Mom took the whole private floor.

She booked it in—” Her voice changed.

She had heard herself.

“Hannah.

She booked it five weeks ago.”

I put the coffee down.

“Nobody invited me.”

What followed was four minutes of my sister-in-law doing the thing decent people do when they have just accidentally handed somebody a knife: she tried, very hard, to make it into an oversight.

Somebody had assumed somebody else.