The silence after those words was the loudest thing in the room.
He sat across from me, composed, hands flat on the table, and he waited. Not impatiently.
With the particular patience of a man who had been waiting for this specific moment for a
very long time and had learned how to be still inside it.
Lucas, to my left, had gone very quiet. Daniel, to my right, had the expression he gets when
he is cataloguing everything and giving nothing away. The recorder sat between us, its small
red light steady.
I looked at Charles Blackwood.
He was not what I had expected. Not the version from the restaurant, precise and controlled,
testing me with 1987 like a chess move. That had been a performance. This was not. This
was what was underneath the performance, and what was underneath was ti
