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Inside the study, the air was warm, smelling of dark tobacco, Moroccan leather, and the heavy parchment of municipal blueprints rolled into pigeonholes along the cherry-paneled walls.
Arthur sat behind his massive mahogany partner’s desk, wearing his reading glasses, his fingers steepled over a dark-blue legal portfolio stamped with the seal of the **Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas**.
Across the desk sat Eleanor.
She wore a soft, cream-colored cable-knit sweater and dark wool trousers that Arthur had asked his sister Sarah to send over from her boutique in Lititz that morning via courier. Her hair was brushed, falling in soft honey-brown waves around her shoulders; her chapped knuckles had been treated with medical lanolin; but the defensive, hyper-vigilant posture of a mother who had fought the wolves for two years remained carved into her spine.
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“Eleanor,” Arthur began, his voice quiet, conversational, and stripped of all corporate distance. “Tell me about Ephrata. Tell me about Chloe’s father.”
