Maren. Caden. Nora. Rowan at the door.
Caden stood at the window with his back to the room for a moment. Not dramatically, I had come to understand that this was how he processed the information he needed to process before he could be in a conversation. The window was where he went when something needed to be integrated before he could speak about it.
He turned.
"Start at the beginning," he said. "All of it."
Maren sat down. I sat across from her. Caden remained standing, not aggressively, not positioned, simply upright in the way of a man who was not ready to be sitting when he heard whatever came next.
She looked at me before she looked at him.
"Your mother's name was Sera," she said. "She grew up in this packhouse. She was twenty-two years old when she left and she did not want to
