She had been rehearsing the call for three days.
Not what she was going to say, she had that. One question. Straightforward. The kind of question that had a limited number of possible answers and whose answer, whatever it was, would tell her what she needed to know. She had been rehearsing the feeling of making it. The act of dialing the number of the federal facility and waiting for his voice.
She made the call on a Friday morning, alone in her wing, with the door closed and her phone on the desk and both hands flat on the surface the way she pressed them when she needed to feel something solid.
The line connected. The facility's holding operator. A hold. Then:
"Elara."
Her father's voice. Warm, familiar, exactly as it had always been. She had feared, in the abstract, that hearing it
