He was already in his pajamas when she got home.
Bathed, fed, sitting on his bed with the book he had chosen for the evening — a picture book about a wolf who builds a house out of river stones, which he had asked for three nights in a row and which Neva suspected he was not reading so much as holding while he thought about something else. He looked up when she came in. His face was the face she knew — the particular arrangement of his features that she had memorized in the first hour after he was born and had not stopped reading since.
Something was sitting behind it tonight.
She changed out of her coat in the other room. Washed her face. The scar under her shirt was quiet now — the bleeding had stopped in the Vault bathroom and had not restarted, and she had checked it twice since and
