I looked at him steadily.
"Alright," I said.
Mitch stood — reading the room with his usual efficiency — and walked out without making a thing of it. The door settled behind him.
Holt looked at the table for a moment. Finding the right entry point into something he'd clearly been building toward for a while.
"When Ryke was small," he said eventually, "Sera used to say he was the kind of person who built things. Not made them, built them — slowly, deliberately, with the understanding that the foundation mattered more than how fast the walls went up." He looked up. "She said it was the thing she loved most about him. The patience of him."
I said nothing. I was learning that some things needed more space than they needed response.
"I spent a long time after she died," he said, "trying to
