(Cassidy)
Dane didn't say much on the drive back.
Neither did I.
The appointment had taken just over an hour. It hadn't felt like an hour. It had felt shorter and longer at the same time in the way things did when you'd been building up to them for so long that the actual event never quite matched the version you'd been rehearsing in your head.
Melissa had been nothing like what I'd expected.
I'd expected someone clinical. Someone who looked at us like a file to be assessed and filed away. Someone who would see the MC affiliation and make a decision in the first five minutes and spend the rest of the time going through the motions.
She hadn't been any of those things.
She'd been direct. She'd asked the hard questions without making them feel like attacks. She'd listened to the answe
