I want him to see that I am not hiding.”
He knocked hard enough to rattle the glass in the frame. Mrs. Parker opened the door and stood in the space of it without stepping back. Ryan looked past her immediately, found Claire at the table, and she watched something in his face change. He had expected to find her frightened. Or sorry. Or at the very least, smaller than she had been at 4:30.
“Claire,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“You can talk from there,” Mrs. Parker said.
His eyes moved to the laptop on the table. Claire closed it, slowly, with one hand. That small motion did more damage than anything she could have said.
“What did you send?” he asked.
“The truth,” she said.
“You don’t understand what you’re involved in.”
She almost smiled. That was the Calloway family’s favorite sentence, deployed in one form
