The Dinner Party

Chapter One: Seven at the Table

Later, when the detective asked her to account for every minute of the evening, Molly Latham would remember the small things first — the wrong things, the useless things. The way the ice cracked in the bucket. The smear of pollen on the windowsill she had meant to wipe. The exact number of steps between the kitchen island and the bottom of the stairs, because she had counted them a hundred times that spring, at two in the morning, at four, at five, in the awful gray hour when her daughter finally slept and Molly stood in the hallway listening to her breathe.

Eleven steps. That was the number. She would give the detective that number and watch her write it down as if it mattered.

At twenty minutes to six on the second Saturday of May, none of it mattered. There was a rack of lamb resting under foil, an asparagus salad she had assembled twice because the first attempt looked like something scraped off a lawn, and a stack of seven cloth napkins the color of wet slate. Seven, because Molly had bought them in a set and could never bring herself to hide the odd one away.

She stood at the kitchen island in bare feet, hair still damp, and looked at the baby monitor.

The monitor was a small white slab propped against the fruit bowl, and on its screen, in grainy silver-green, her daughter lay on her back in the crib with both arms flung up over her head like a tiny surrender. Ellie Jane Latham. Six months and eleven days old. Nine pounds of shrieking colic in her first weeks, sixteen pounds of surprising calm now, with Mark's chin and Molly's mother's improbable eyelashes.

Molly watched the small rise of the blanket. She counted eight breaths, which was six more than she needed and four fewer than she wanted, and then she made herself put the monitor down and go back to the asparagus.

This was the thing nobody had prepared her for. Not the sleeplessness — everyone warned you about the sleeplessness — but the way love could arrive with its own private siren attached. In February, in the worst of it, she had sat on the nursery floor at four in the morning with Ellie screaming against her collarbone and had felt, for one long clean second, that she was going to lay the baby down and walk out the front door in her socks and keep walking. She had told her doctor about that second. She had told Lisa. She had not told her husband, and she had certainly not told her mother-in-law, and the reason she had not told them was the same reason she was, at this moment, arranging asparagus into a fan: because there was a version of Molly Latham that people could see from the outside, and it was a very good version, and she had gotten extremely good at keeping the curtains open on it.

The garage door rumbled. Mark came in at four minutes to six with two bottles of wine in a paper bag and his tie already loose, and he kissed her on the temple, which was where he kissed her now instead of the mouth.

"Traffic on Route 7 was biblical," he said. "Is she down?"

"Not yet. Seven-thirty."

"Right. Seven-thirty." He set the bag on the counter and looked around the kitchen the way a man looks at a room he has been asked to admire. "This looks amazing. You look amazing."

"I look like I've been awake since Thursday."

"Then you look amazing for someone who's been awake since Thursday." He pulled out one of the bottles and turned the label toward her, and there was something too bright in the gesture, like a boy showing his homework. "They had the Barolo. The one from the anniversary dinner, remember? Two years ago? Three. Three years ago."

"Three years ago today," Molly said.

"Three years ago today." He set the bottle down. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and into that silence came the small sounds of the house — the refrigerator, the ticking oven, the low hum of the monitor's speaker carrying nothing but the whisper of a sleeping baby's white-noise machine.

He had been working late three nights a week since January. Sometimes four. He was a senior engineer at a fintech company in Stamford called Cobalt Ledger, which meant that when he said the words "release window" Molly had no way of testing them. In March she had found a receipt in his jacket for a hotel bar in Bridgeport, dated on a night he had told her he was at the office. She had held that receipt in the laundry room for ten minutes deciding what kind of wife she was going to be, and then she had put it in the recycling, because she was so tired that a fight felt like a luxury item, something you had to be well-rested to afford.

"Mark," she said.

"Mm."

"Are we okay?"

He smiled. It was a good smile; it had worked on her at a rooftop party in Boston six years ago and it mostly still worked. "We're hosting a dinner party for our third anniversary," he said. "Who does that if they're not okay?"

Which was not an answer, and both of them knew it, and then the doorbell rang and there was no more time.

It was Madison Groff, twenty minutes early, in a hoodie with the sleeves pushed up and a canvas bag over her shoulder.

"Sorry," she said. "My roommate was driving to her shift and it was this or the six-fifty bus."

"You're a gift," Molly said, and meant it.

Madison was nineteen, a sophomore at the state university branch two towns over, and she had grown up four streets away on Chandler Road, which in a place like Colby Hills counted as a background check. She had sat with Ellie eight or nine times since March. She was unhurried and unbothered and she read paperbacks in the dark by the light of her phone, and she had once texted Molly a photograph of Ellie asleep with the caption *she has opinions about tummy time* and Molly had cried a little, in the good way.

"So," Madison said, dumping her bag at the foot of the stairs. "Dinner party. How fancy are we talking? Do I need to hide?"

"Two couples from the neighborhood. Very small. Honestly, the whole point of you is so I don't have to keep running upstairs."

"You're going to keep running upstairs."

"I'm going to keep running upstairs," Molly admitted.

"That's fine. Just don't wake her, she's a nightmare when she's woken." Madison pulled a paperback and a phone charger out of her bag. "I have a Poli Sci midterm Tuesday, so honestly, sitting in a quiet room for four hours is a favor to me."

Molly took her up. The nursery was the second door on the left at the top of the front stairs, a small square room she had painted the color of skim milk and then, in a fit of nesting, stenciled with a border of tiny gray birds. There was the crib, the dresser with the changing pad, the rocking chair with the sheepskin thrown over the back. There was the window in the side wall, sash and screen, looking out over the strip of side yard and the low roof of the porch below.

It was the room Molly had photographed for her portfolio. Two clients had asked for a version of it.

"Bottle's in the mini-fridge if she wakes, but she shouldn't," Molly said. "She had one at seven. Monitor's on, camera's on. I'll have the parent unit on the counter."

"Copy."

Molly went down and came back up with a plate — lamb she'd carved off the end, roasted potatoes, a heap of the twice-made salad — and a cold bottle of water from the door of the fridge, seal intact, beaded with condensation. She handed both to Madison, who said, "Oh, this is above and beyond," and set the water on the dresser beside the monitor camera, and that was the last completely ordinary thing that happened in Molly Latham's house.

At seven-twenty-five she laid Ellie in the crib. The baby fussed for eleven seconds, found her own fist, and went quiet.

Molly stood over her with one hand on the rail. Downstairs she could hear her husband uncorking wine and the murmur of the first guests coming up the front path, and she thought, with the strange precision of the sleep-deprived, *I want this evening to be over.*

She kissed two fingers, pressed them to the mattress an inch from her daughter's head, and went down to answer the door.