They set us up in the small stone room off the east gate — the kind of space used for formal negotiations, neutral ground within the territory's boundary. A table. Two chairs. A window too narrow to be anything but decorative.
My father sat across from me and folded his hands the way he always did when he was preparing to be reasonable, and I looked at those hands and remembered being eight years old and waiting for them to reach toward me and learning, over years of waiting, that they were not hands that reached.
"You look well," he said.
"You came a long way to tell me that."
He exhaled. Set something aside — the performance of warmth, I thought, deciding it wasn't going to work. "You know why I'm here."
"You found out I have something you want," I said. "You're here to collect it."
