The silence on the other end lasted exactly three seconds.
“Where are you?” Sebastian said.
His voice had changed entirely. The warmth was still there — but underneath it, the other thing. The boardroom thing. The thing that meant he had already shifted into the mode of a man who was done being surprised by his own family and had decided, quietly and completely, that whatever came next he was going to face directly.
“Linden’s,” she said. “South end. Come now.”
She hung up.
Went back inside.
Sat across from Selene.
“They’re coming,” she said.
Selene looked at her with the expression of a woman who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has just found somewhere to set it down.
“Good,” she said.
Outside the Atherton morning moved in its beautiful indifferent way — the
