Marlowe
Bear invited us to his own quarters rather than the garage or his usual office, and I understood immediately, from the careful way he'd arranged two chairs across from his own before we'd even arrived, that whatever he intended to share required a kind of privacy he rarely extended to anyone.
"I appreciate you both making time," he said, settling across from us with the small, worn photograph already in hand. "This isn't easy for me. Haven't talked about this with anyone in considerably longer than either of you have probably been alive."
He handed the photograph across, and I studied it carefully — a young woman, laughing, standing beside a considerably younger version of Bear himself, both of them clearly captured in some unguarded, happy moment decades in the past.
"Her name
