Mary knocked on the door of the 23rd-floor apartment herself, and Erik stood one pace behind her with his hands clasped, like a man escorting a queen.
"You don't need to carry that," she told him, without turning. She held a covered dish in both hands. "Let them see an ordinary woman with a plate."
"You're not ordinary, Mom."
"Hush."
The door opened on its chain. Alex's eye appeared in the gap, then his whole face as the chain came off, and then he stopped moving entirely. He looked at Mary, and something crossed his features that Erik could only describe as a man doing arithmetic and not liking the answer. The woman Alex remembered had been nearly fifty, with silver in her hair and lines around her eyes from laughing at breakfast tables. The woman in front of him looked about thirty-two.
His mouth opened.
Mary raised one eyebrow. It was the exact eyebrow she had used on a seventeen-year-old caught eating the last of the biscuits.
Alex closed his mouth.
