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The answer came on the social page of the Los Angeles Times. I didn’t read the paper regularly, but Anh did, so we got it delivered to the office.

We were taking an afternoon break as we planned our next consulting gig. I was drinking coffee and answering emails. She was sitting across the desk and reading the paper when she suddenly looked up at me with something akin to horror.

I glanced up. “What?”

Her eyes flitted back and forth between me and the paper. “Uhhh…”

I frowned. “What?”

“Hypothetically… if I knew something that I knew you’d want to know, but it wouldn’t help you and would probably just make you upset, should I still tell you?” she asked in a miserable voice. “…hypothetically.”

Terror of the unnamed and unimaginable surged through me. I clicked through a list of things she might be talking about – my parents were in an accident, my brother was hurt, Connor –

Connor.

The newspaper.

There was something in there about him.

Our eyes locked, and she knew I knew.

She started