The boys, the shelters, the six years of grief on both sides: all of it, every bit, was the cost my mother had been willing to make five other people pay so that she would not have to lose control of one.
That was not a snob.
I had comforted myself for three years with snob. This was something with no soft part in it anywhere.
Chapter 20 — The Call
I took out my phone and found a number I had saved three years earlier and never let myself dial.
I put it on speaker, so there would be witnesses, so it would happen in the open in front of all of us.
It rang twice.
“Vasser,” said a voice, old and dry and careful.
“Emeric,” I said.
“It’s Auden Ravensworth.
I’m standing in my own living room right now — with my mother, with Yelena, and with my four sons.”
The pause on the line went on for a long time.
“Auden,” Vasser said at last, and something in the old man’s voice sounded almost like relief.
“I told your mother, six years ago, that this day would come.