Mitch was already typing. "I'll confirm receipt from the council by morning."
Holt nodded.
"How was she," Neva said. Quiet. Not asking about the logistics.
Holt looked at her.
"Surprised that I called," he said. "Not that I needed something. That I called at all." He paused. "She said she'd been wondering when I would. Said she'd assumed, after the first year, that I wouldn't. That she understood, but that she'd hoped I would eventually." Something in his voice — the specific roughness of a man who'd just found out an absence he'd maintained to protect himself had been felt on the other side of it as abandonment. "She wasn't angry. That was the hardest part."
The room was quiet.
"She said something about Sera," Holt continued, carefully. "Something I needed to hear." He looked at his
