Billie Voss at sixty-four was not a large man, never had been, but there was something about the way he stood in a room, a kind of practiced stillness, that made you forget that. He had my eyes, or I had his. Depending on who you asked. Dark, watchful, calibrated to miss very little. He looked at me first, the way he always did, and whatever he found in my face made something in his own shift, not break, not collapse, but shift, the careful controlled way of a man who has been holding something in place for a very long time and has just decided to stop.
Then he looked at Sebastian.
The two of them regarded each other across the threshold in a silence that had entire decades folded inside it.
“You’d better come in,” my father said.
He had coffee waiting. Three cups, already poured. My m
