The game shop's noise fell away behind the Audi's doors.
Stan drove without hurry. Camilla's look rode with him, the cool judgment, the unfinished sentence in her eyes, then settled into the back of his mind where he kept things he would have to answer later. He had said he would come. Amelia was leaving the country before the day finished. Promises that small were the ones that taught people what you were.
Expectation arrived quietly, not as hunger so much as a forward lean. The city thinned into the hotel's cleaner streets. He parked, took the elevator that smelled like carpet and citrus cleaner, and found the number she had sent.
He knocked.
Amelia opened the door as if she had been standing close to it and pretending she had not. The change in her face was immediate and unguarded: surprise first, then warmth rising so fast it colored her throat. Relief, too, the particular kind that comes when a person actually does what they said they would.
