Rhys says nothing for five seconds.
Which is four seconds longer than his usual processing time and tells me everything about what that name means to him.
"Who is Petra Haynes to you?" I ask.
He stands up from the couch, walks to the window, stands there with his back to the room looking out at the street below and I watch his shoulders do the thing where they carry something heavy and try not to show it.
Joel is very still in the armchair.
Which means Joel knows too.
"Rhys," Nora says from the kitchen. Quiet. Warning.
"She was before Isla," he says finally, without turning around. "Before Vivienne. Four years before either of them."
I wait.
"We were together two years," he says. "It ended badly. She wanted things I could not give her at the time and I handled
