Marlowe
I rode home two days later under the thin excuse of retrieving old belongings, King staying behind at my insistence — showing up together would have raised questions neither of us had good answers for yet, and I needed, badly, to look Dorian in the eye without an audience watching either of our reactions.
The house looked exactly the same as I remembered, small and tired at the edges, and I stood on the porch a long moment before I made myself knock instead of simply walking in the way I used to when this was still, technically, my home.
Dorian answered, and something in his face shifted the second he saw me — not surprise exactly, something closer to a man bracing for a conversation he'd been dreading for longer than just this particular morning.
"Marlowe." He said my name car
