My father talked for forty minutes.
He sat at the war room table — the same table where eleven words had silenced ten men — and he talked the way a man talks when he's been holding a story for nineteen years and the holding has cost him more than the story itself. His hands were on the table. His coffee was untouched. Cole stood at the head of the table with his palms flat on the surface and Marcos stood behind him with the tablet and nobody interrupted because the story was a building and you don't interrupt a building while it's collapsing.
