Her name was Caroline Ashby. Callum’s mother.
She stood on the front steps of the Hargrove estate with her hands clasped in front of her and the look of a woman who had rehearsed this arrival many times in the years since she had last stood on these grounds, and still found it harder than the rehearsal.
Damien looked at her for a long moment. His face was doing nothing. That particular nothing that was actually the maximum load bearing capacity of a human face, the nothing that holds something tremendous in place by refusing to let it move.
“You have an hour,” he said. “Come inside.”
I made to follow at a distance and he looked back at me. “Stay,” he said. Not a command. A request. They were becoming distinguishable.
I stayed.
Mrs. Aldren appeared beside me as though summoned by the
