Théo comes down the stairs the same way he went up, measured, deliberate, the footsteps of a boy who has learned to move carefully in uncertain situations without being told why the situation is uncertain.
He comes into the kitchen and he looks at the assembled room and he does what I have watched Faye do a hundred times in the past twenty five days, he reads it. Completely. In the specific, unhurried way of someone who grew up in a quiet place with a vigilant mother and learned early that rooms contain more than their surface.
He looks at Reves first. His expression closes fractionally, the instinctive response of someone who has been told, in not so many words, that certain kinds of men represent certain kinds of danger. He has never met Reves. He knows something about what Reves repre
