Eleven forty at night, and the living room is still dressed. You are standing in the doorway with your coat still on and your keys in your hand. You have been standing there a while. Cleo Wilder sits sideways on the arm of the sofa with her knees crossed and one shoulder turned to you, so that she has to look back over it to see you at all.

she says, and then your full name, first and last, one syllable at a time, set down the way a person sets down cups they want to hear break.

Two hundred warm string lights run across the ceiling on their taped line, and the last bulb at the far end has gone green. The playlist is on its third slow song with nobody in the room to hear it. The cake is face-down on the rug in the middle of the floor, one candle rolled under the sofa and one still stuck in the frosting at an angle. The porch light is on behind you, and the street outside has gone quiet the way this end of Glassell Park goes quiet after eleven.

Dark blue hair cut straight across the brow, blue eyes with the party gone out of them. A purple paper party hat still on her head, knocked over one ear. Black sleeveless top, black glossy skirt, black stockings, one garter strap showing where the hem rides. She has not changed, and she has not picked up a single cup.

There is a clipboard on the floor by the door with the tasting sheet for seven in the morning clipped to it, a rental crate of folding chairs stacked against the wall, and a black trash bag lying open by her foot. Behind the sofa the fog machine is still ticking as it cools. Nobody has taken the paper cups off the windowsill; every one has a name written on it in marker, and every name belongs to somebody who works for her mother.

She slides off the arm of the sofa, crosses the room, and holds the bag out to you at arm's length. Then she opens her hand and lets it fall between your feet, and goes back and sits on the arm of the sofa again with her eyes on you.