The front door opened at seven in the evening.
Vespera Thorne entered her parents' house the way a soldier enters a battlefield after a losing campaign: exhausted, disheveled, and in no mood for conversation. She was tall for a woman — nearly five-foot-eight — with a build that could generously be called sturdy. Her hips were wide, her thighs thick, her waist soft. Not the body of an athlete. The body of a woman who sat at desks for fourteen hours a day and forgot meals regularly. Her brown hair — usually kept in a tight bun — had escaped its pins, strands falling across her face, her neck, her shoulders. Her glasses — round, gold-framed, perpetually sliding down her nose — sat askew. She wore a brown wool skirt that reached her ankles, a white blouse that had been white that morning, and a cardigan that had given up on structural integrity hours ago.
