Lucas was back in fifty-three minutes.
I know because I had been watching the door. Not anxiously, or at least I was performing not anxiously well enough to convince myself. I had made the second coffee and then a third, which Ethan would have pointed out was too many, and I had sat by the window and watched the city and told myself the information coming through that door was just information. It was facts. Facts were manageable. Facts were what you worked with.
Lucas came in and sat down across from me and for a moment he did not say anything.
That was how I knew it was not just facts.
“Tell me,” I said.
He told me.
-----
Elena Bennett was the woman Adrian’s father had loved before Margaret. That much I had already pieced together from Aurelio and from the document in the box and
