The living room held all of them.
The full group — chosen ones, Thomas, Dean, William sitting near the door with his tea, KaSandra in the chair near the hallway with the golden eyes and the particular quality of someone who had already read the shape of what was coming and was present for the telling of it anyway, because the telling mattered even when you knew the shape.
Emmet sat near the low table.
He sat the way he had always sat, Katherine gathered from the way Tierney watched him — with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely linked and the quality of someone who had never been entirely comfortable with being looked at but had learned to hold still under the looking because the looking was sometimes necessary.
He looked at the room.
The room looked at him.
"I'll start at the beginning," he said. "Or close to it. The part that matters."
"Take your time," Thomas said.
Emmet looked at the table.
"When Victor put me under," he said, "it was not what I expected. I expected nothing — that was what the sleep spell was supposed to produce, a kind of darkness without texture, the way deep sleep feels when you don't dream. But Lisa Stone's sleep magic was not that." He paused. "It was a place. A specific place that was not a place, the way dreams are not places but feel like them — a room that stayed the same no matter where I tried to move in it. Not dark. Just still. Like being held."
"How long," Carlyle asked. His voice was very even.
"To me," Emmet said, "it felt like days. Possibly weeks. The time inside it did not move the way time moves out here — it moved the way time moves when nothing is happening and there is no measure for it." He looked at his son. "To you it was years. I know that now. I didn't know it then."
Carlyle held his gaze.
"I know," Carlyle said.
"I need you to know," Emmet said, "that if I had known — if I had understood what the time difference was going to be — I would have found a way out. I would have—"
"Emmet," Carlyle said.
Emmet stopped.
"I know," Carlyle said again. Quiet. Certain. Carrying everything. "I know you would have."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then Emmet looked back at the table and continued.