I left Cindy to her task and headed upstairs to the last floor.
I knocked once and pushed the door open.
She was on the bed, sitting cross-legged near the center of it with a book open in her lap, the pages held flat by one hand. Sonny was stretched out beside her. The strangest part was how natural it looked. Like a girl and her dog, if you didn't look too closely at the dog.
She was wearing glasses I hadn't seen before. Some kind of eyewear that didn't look like anything manufactured on this planet, slightly too angular, lenses tinted in a way that shifted depending on the angle. Weird, but on her, somehow not surprising.
The moment she registered me in the doorway, the book came down and her whole posture changed. The easy, reading-in-the-afternoon quality of it pulled back and something more guarded moved in to replace it. Her eyes cut briefly to Sonny.
"You don't need to do that every time," I said.
