Julian drove to his father's house alone.
Sophie had offered to come. He'd said no, quietly and without explanation, and she had looked at his face and understood , the way she understood most things about him now — that this was the kind of conversation a man needed to have with his father without a witness. She'd squeezed his hand once at the door and let him go.
Edmund lived in Kensington, in a house that had been in the Calloway family for three generations — high ceilings, dark wood, the particular hush of old money that had learned to be tasteful rather than loud. Julian had grown up in this house. He had learned to read the room at eight years old in the dining room downstairs, had given his first business presentation in the study at sixteen, had sat at that same desk at twenty-t
