We need to talk was, Zarina had learned over thirty-one years of living, one of the more efficient sentences in the English language for inducing a specific kind of low-grade panic regardless of context, and she read it three times on her walk to meet him with her stomach doing something unhelpful the entire way.
He was waiting outside the same coffee shop as before, hands in his pockets against the cold, and something in his posture — steady, but carrying a weight she recognized from the last hard conversation they'd had here — told her before he said a word that whatever this was, it wasn't good news dressed up as bad news.
"Counsel made a decision," he said, once they were seated, no preamble this time, the specific directness of a man who'd learned, painfully, that delaying a hard th
