The kitchen was silent for a very long moment.

And then Harrison Vance did something that Maya was not expecting, and that she would spend the rest of that night trying to interpret, and that would turn out to be the most important thing that happened in that house.

He did not say that’s impossible.

He did not say you’re mistaken, or are you all right, or any of the eleven things a man tells a woman when she says something insane in his kitchen at nine o’clock at night.

He pulled out the stool across from her and sat down and said, quietly: