Chapter 3: What the Mill Town Doesn't Say About the Voss Parents

The library was warm in the way that old buildings hold warmth — not efficiently, but with a kind of hoarding stubbornness, the heat accumulated over decades pressing itself into the wood and the books and the particular smell of pages going slowly back to dust. Callum had been coming here since he was seven. Mrs. Able had never once asked him why he was there or when he was leaving. This was, in his experience, the rarest and most valuable quality a person could have.

He came three days after Marsh's visit, ostensibly to return two books on coastal geography that he had finished and no longer needed, actually because the house on Ridder Street had become unbearable in a new and specific way. His uncle and aunt had not changed. That was the problem. They moved through the kitchen and the sitting room with the same compressed silences they had always maintained, Gregor's newspaper redistributed every morning into its false disorder, Sable's hands finding small tasks at the counter whenever a room threatened to contain more than two people. Nothing had been said about December first. Nothing had been said about Dunhollow. Nothing had been said.

The difference was that now Callum understood the nothing was not absence. It was weight. It had always been weight, and he had simply not had the word for what he was standing under.