The room smelled of old perfume and tension. Sunlight cut in through the tall windows and landed in neat rectangles on the polished floor, but it did nothing to warm the faces gathered there. My father sat at the head of the long table, a slow, deliberate presence. Around him the others shifted like animals waiting for a signal careful, restless, a hair's breadth from violence.
My mind went somewhere else. Alpha Kasper. The name had been a soft ache inside me for years, a picture I could not quite place. He was a golf champion who moved through the city like a rumoralways masked, always distant. I had known nothing real about him except the curve of his shoulders, the way he laughed when he let his guard down in private. To me he was a myth made desirable by absence.
