Page 10 of The Silent Hour

His laugh was low and genuine, crinkling the corners of his eyes. I watched him for a second before looking ahead again. Most men who knew Tato's name did one of two things. They tried too hard to prove they weren't intimidated by it, or they suddenly treated me like an extension of him.

Ethan did neither. He simply absorbed the fact of my father like a detail in a case file, his expression not shifting from its baseline of calm assessment. “So how did you get into music?” he asked again, the question landing as cleanly as the first time.

I smiled. “We’re circling back?”

“I asked a question.” His tone was patient, but there was an attorney’s persistence beneath it.

“And apparently lawyers can’t survive without answers.”

“Now you’re learning.”

I looked down at the pavement sliding beneath our feet, thinking. “I don’t really remember starting. It was just... there.”

His expression softened with genuine interest, the late sunlight catching the faint lines at the corners of his eyes.

“There was always music in our house. Mama played everything—scratchy old records of salsa, Tchaikovsky on the stereo, folk songs from Sevastopol that sounded like they’d been recorded in someone’s kitchen. Shit she probably shouldn’t have been playing around children.” I smiled at the memory. “I gravitated toward the violin. Something about the shape of it, I think. Tato didn’t hesitate, just bought me one the next week. I’ve been playing for almost twenty years now.”

We reached the bookstore he’d mentioned, its front window stacked with haphazard piles of new releases and faded classics. Ethan reached out and pulled open the heavy wooden door for me, hinges groaning softly.

The air inside was thick and sweet with the ghosts of old paper, undercut by the sharp, clean scent of lemon oil on polished wood floors and the rich, dark promise of coffee brewing somewhere in the back.

I stopped just over the threshold, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light. Bookshelves—dark oak, crammed to sagging—stretched into a deep, shadowy interior, their aisles narrow and inviting. Handwritten cards in looping script were tucked beneath select spines like secret recommendations. A narrow, uncarpeted staircase with worn treads curved up and out of sight.

"This place has a whiskey bar?" I asked, my voice low.

"Upstairs." His answer was simple, his hands in his pockets.

I turned my head slowly to look at him, one eyebrow raised. "Books and whiskey?"

"I thought you'd appreciate the efficiency of vices." A faint smile touched his mouth.

"You might actually be useful."

"I’m glad you’re starting to notice."

I let out a soft laugh and drifted toward the nearest shelf, running my fingers along a row of cloth-bound spines. For the next half hour, we drifted apart and converged again in the quiet maze, our footsteps hushed on the wooden floor. The silence was broken only by the occasional rustle of a turned page or the soft thud of a book being reshelved.

I learned he gravitated toward thick biographies of dead politicians, legal thrillers he dismissed with a quiet chuckle for their procedural inaccuracies, and an obscene number of dense historical treatises. He learned that I would pick up a book for its cover alone despite my claims to the contrary.

At one point, I pulled a novel with a deep blue cover and silver foil lettering from a middle shelf. I read the back-flap synopsis twice, then set it carefully back in its gap.

"You didn't like it?" he asked from the next aisle over.

"I did."

"Then why’d you put it back?"

"I own too many books."

He rounded the corner. "That's not a real problem."

"It is when you run out of shelves." I gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. "It becomes an architectural issue."

He picked the book up and tucked it neatly beneath his arm.

"Put it back."

"I'm buying myself a book," he argued, already turning away.