ELLIOT
“She does not know I exist.”
The young man said it without self-pity. As a fact that required stating before anything else could be said. He sat across from them in a coffee shop two streets from the house on Calloway Street and held his cup with both hands and looked at the table with the expression of someone who had rehearsed this conversation many times and was discovering the rehearsal had not covered the actual weight of it.
James Obi Junior was thirty-one. Lean. The same quality of watchfulness as his sister but quieter in it. Less sharpened by years of deliberate construction. He looked like someone who had been carrying something privately for a long time and had decided, this particular morning, that he was finished carrying it alone.
“Your mother,” Sera said. “She did
