Safe. The Vale family's vocabulary for contained. She did not ask for details. There were questions she had decided not to ask in the days since their daughter was taken because the answers lived in a territory she had chosen to trust Julian to navigate while she navigated the parts of this she could reach.
She nodded.
She was about to say something, she did not yet know what, but something, some acknowledgment of the fact that the ground had just shifted slightly in their direction, when she heard the front door.
Not a knock.
The door simply opened, the way doors open when the person on the other side has made a decision and is carrying it through before uncertainty can intervene, and then there were footsteps in the entrance, and then there was a voice speaking to one of the staff, and then—
A woman walked into the living room.
She was blonde.
