My mother's apartment smelled like ginger and scallions when we walked in, the same smell it had smelled like my entire childhood, and something about that ordinary, familiar comfort colliding with the enormity of what I was about to confess made my eyes sting before either of us had said a word.
She looked at Julian for a long moment in the doorway — really looked, the particular unhurried assessment of a woman who'd spent a career reading rich people's houses for what they revealed about the people who lived in them — and whatever she saw apparently earned him entry, because she stepped back and let us both inside without comment.
"Sit," she said, gesturing at the small kitchen table, and I recognized the tone immediately, the one she'd used my entire life for conversations that matter
