Dina had heard Grace laugh ten thousand times, but never from across a table.
They'd been sitting next to each other since sophomore organic chemistry — same lab bench, same side. At dinners, always adjacent. In cars, always shotgun. Eighteen years of Grace's laugh arriving at Dina's right ear without ever crossing her line of sight.
So when Grace leaned forward to blow out the candles and the laugh came — the one that meant she was genuinely delighted, not the one she used at work functions — Dina saw it happen for the first time. The way Grace's chin dropped a quarter-inch before the sound started, like the laugh was something she had to make room for. The way the left side of her mouth opened first, always the left, pulling her whole face slightly off-center in a way that eighteen years of audio had never suggested.
"You lean," Dina said, before she could stop herself.
"What?"
"When you laugh. You lean left."
Grace's face did something complicated — pleased, self-conscious, reaching for the appropriate reaction and finding that no one had ever told her this particular thing about herself before. "I do?"
"Always."
Around them, people were cutting cake, refilling drinks. Someone's kid had gotten frosting on the dog. The party was doing what parties do: continuing without requiring anyone's attention.
"Is it bad?" Grace said, in the voice she used for news that might require adjustment.
"No. I just — we always sit on the same side."
Grace considered this. Not the leaning, Dina thought, but the same-side part. The eighteen years of adjacency that had kept her close enough to hear every shade of that laugh but never angled right to watch it land.
"Huh," Grace said.
She didn't ask Dina to elaborate. She didn't make a joke about it. She picked up her fork and cut into the cake, and when she looked up, she held Dina's gaze for one beat longer than their usual rhythm, as if checking whether Dina's face also did things she'd never seen from that direction.