RILEY
I asked him in the morning.
Not the morning after the warehouse — that morning I was still in the processing stage, still working out which feeling went where, still reconstructing the ordinary around the extraordinary. The morning after that morning. When the twins were at Mara's for a few hours and the apartment was quiet and I'd been sitting with my coffee for long enough to know what I actually wanted to say.
"Explain the bond to me," I said. "What it actually is. What it does. What it costs."
He was at the other end of the counter. He looked at me for a moment, checking the register of the question — was this confrontational, was this clinical, was this something else — and whatever he found made him set down the coffee mug and sit properly.
"From the beginning?" he asked.
