Rhea stepped back from the door to let us in, and I watched something pass over her face that I'd never seen from her before, something closer to resignation.
"Sit," she said. "Both of you. This is going to take longer than ten minutes, and I'd rather you weren't standing for it."
Mia set the photograph down on the table between us, the two women still laughing at something outside the frame, frozen in a moment neither of them could have known was borrowed time.
"Who is she," Mia said. Not a request. A demand dressed carefully enough to still sound like a question.
Rhea looked at the photograph for a long moment before she answered, and I understood, watching her, that she was deciding not whether to tell us but how much of it she could say without breaking something she'd promised to
