That was how the Callahan men had always handled grief—one ordinary detail shoved in front of the next until the pain had to stand in line and wait its turn.
“Eli,” Dean said, his voice flattened by poor reception and something heavier than distance. “He passed early this morning.”
I stared at the shelf like the answer to death might be printed on a tube of industrial adhesive.
“Where?”
“Tok.”
That made me close my eyes.
Not because I had forgotten where Dad lived. Nobody in the family forgot Tok, Alaska. You could leave it, curse it, outrun it, pretend it had never shaped the bend in your shoulders or the weather in your bones—but you didn’t forget it.
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