***Present day.***
Eveline.
I hang up the phone and sit very still in the dark of my room, Julian's voice still ringing somewhere behind my ribs.
*I need to see you.*
*I have something to tell you. About your father.*
Not Harold. He said father, not Uncle Harold, not any of the careful, deliberate phrasing everyone in my life has learned to use around the word dad since I was twelve years old and the man who gave it meaning stopped being there to answer to it.
He meant James.
I turn the phone over in my hands like it might tell me something the call didn't.
Julian doesn't call at midnight. Julian doesn't call sounding like that — unsteady, stripped of the practiced ease he wears at every family dinner like a second skin.
Something happened at that house tonight. Something after
