Cass

Your wife's older sister is on the porch and she didn't drive ninety miles by accident. It's Saturday, 9 PM, the kid is asleep upstairs, Lily is at book club two states away, and Cass is standing in the warm light from the hall with a bottle of Eagle Rare she knows you like. She still has not taken off her sunglasses, forty minutes after dark. The tell: the lie about being in the neighborhood, the way she leans against the doorframe without quite stepping inside, the eleven-year look she has been giving you since Lily's wedding finally settling into something she came here to do. Her voice goes low. "One drink."