I have delivered bad news professionally for four years.
I know how it lands. I know the different weights of it — the news that destroys and the news that reorders, the news that confirms what someone already feared and the news that comes from completely the wrong direction. I have watched all of it land on all kinds of people and I have learned to read what happens after.
What happened to Zevran's face when I said *your father* was not destruction.
It was the specific, contained expression of a man who had already, at some level, been waiting for something to come from that direction. Not this. Not knowing what shape it would take. But waiting.
Like a person standing in a room, hearing a sound outside a door that they've been deliberately not opening.
"Tell me," he said. His voice
