She talked for forty minutes.
Not the performed confession of someone who has rehearsed what they will say when the moment finally arrives. Not the careful measured disclosure of a woman protecting herself while appearing to disclose. Just the truth, delivered cleanly, in the order it happened, because she was too old and too tired of secrets to perform anything else.
I listened.
Caden listened. He had moved back to the window at some point, not dramatically, the slow return of a man who thinks better standing, who processes at the glass while the world reorganizes itself below him. Rowan was at the door. Still. Recording everything in the way Rowan recorded things, without writing anything down, the information filing itself into the careful cataloguing system behind those steady eyes.
