Yvette came without calling first. Julian opened the door and found Yvette on the other side of it, looking like two months had happened to her all at once, thinner than he remembered, the careful polish she had always maintained worn down to something rawer underneath.
Her eyes were red at the edges in the way that comes not from one bout of crying but from crying that has become simply a condition of existing.
He let her in because he was not the kind of man who turned people away from his door, and because whatever she had done and whatever she was, she was a mother who did not know where her child was. That counted for something. It had to.
She sat on the edge of the sofa and talked quickly, the words coming out with the slightly desperate momentum of someone who has rehearsed this and is afraid of losing their nerve.
