Lily knows before anyone tells her.
This is how Lily operates. She has been watching the household atmospheric pressure since she was old enough to understand that what people said and what was actually happening were sometimes different registers of the same situation. She reads the gap between them the way other people read text.
The gap this week is significant.
Her parents are doing the thing they do when something real is happening — the specific calibration of normal that isn't quite normal. The slightly extended kitchen conversations that stop at a natural point rather than trailing off. The way her father came in from the barn office on Thursday afternoon and had a twenty-minute conversation with her mother that they clearly thought was private but was audible in the register of a house that knows its own sounds.
Lily sits with this for two days.
