RILEY
Reyes picked up on the first ring, which told me she'd been expecting the call and had been sitting with it. I was at the kitchen table at ten-seventeen in the evening, the house completely quiet, the twins deeply asleep, Knox somewhere in the building doing his late-evening work with the practiced tact of a man who understood when to create space without making the creating of space into its own performance.
I'd waited until the children were down and I'd been still for twenty minutes before I made the call. I needed to come to this conversation grounded — the Grounding, now that I had a word for it. I needed to know my own frequency was steady before I walked into what this was going to be.
"You told Knox to give me the report tonight," I said.
"Yes." No softening. No performan
