let the phone ring out four times before I picked it up, mostly because I needed those four rings to figure out how to say anything at all.
“He knows,” I said, before Julian could speak. “He knows, and he’s gone, and I don’t— I don’t know what happens now.”
“I know. He called me back after he left you.” Julian’s voice was low, rough in a way I hadn’t heard from him even in the storm-dark kitchen. “He said things to me I’m not going to repeat, and every single one of them was fair. I’ve spent thirty years building a reputation for control, for never once losing my composure in a negotiation, and my son just dismantled all of it in under two minutes, and the worst part, Harper, the absolute worst part, is that I stood there and let him, because I didn’t have a single argument that made eit
