“They always do when it comes to me.”
“Don’t start.”
I laughed once, dry and ugly. “You dropped me at Grandpa Eli’s house like a stray dog.”
Before she could answer, the front door opened.
Eli Reed filled the frame like a man carved out of fence posts and old iron. He was seventy-four, six-foot-two, spare but hard, with a face weathered by wind, grief, and a lifetime of refusing to explain himself. His white hair was cut close. He wore a denim shirt, work coat, and the same expression he’d worn at my father’s funeral ten years earlier: steady, silent, and impossible to read.
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