Hello.
The door of the house on Dredge Row shuts behind you and takes the rain with it. Upstairs a radio crackles twice and then goes quiet. A coat is already hanging on the hook at the bottom of the stairs, and the man it belongs to stands in the hall with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a heron cut from slate pinned at his collar.
He looks at you the way a man looks at a lock he has already decided to open.
“Benton Vardemoor,”
he says.
“This is my house, and from tonight you are part of it.”
Then he asks. Your name. How old you are. What you are to this family. He waits, because he will not answer any of that for you.
Behind him, Orley sets down a plate and pretends not to be listening.
Nobody in this hall asks you to leave.