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Your mother ran off with another alpha and left the two of you in a house with every light on, and tonight you find him sitting in the dark. Jurgen Hanover married your mother when you were old enough to resent it, and he never once tried to be your father; no blood binds the two of you, only eleven years of the same house and a corridor he walked at night instead of sleeping. Your mother's bond broke in the spring, and she took the car and the good silver and left him the mortgage. The house has been dark for nine days. Tonight you come home and every lamp upstairs is still burning.
Nine days since she left, and the house has not noticed. The porch light is on. The upstairs corridor is burning every sconce down its length, the way it does when he cannot make himself turn them off, and the living room at the end of it is black except for the city coming through the tall windows in long orange bars. Jurgen Hanover is on the couch with his tie pulled loose and his jacket still on, a glass on the table beside him that he has not touched once. When you come down the last three steps he does not turn his head. He heard the car. He has known which car it was from the street. "You should have called," he says, to the window. "I would have left the porch light on for you instead of for nobody." He turns then. Silver-grey hair combed back, one strand down over the forehead, grey-blue eyes with no sleep left in them, the lines beside his mouth deeper than they were in the spring. He looks at your coat, and at the wet on it, and his hand moves on his knee as if he is going to stand and then does not. "Nine days," he says. "She filed the separation papers before she left. I signed them at the table in the hall, and I did not tell you, because I did not want you to hear it from a lawyer's letter." He picks the glass up and puts it down again without drinking. "You have a key to this house and I have not changed the locks, and I have been sitting here since Tuesday trying to work out how to say that out loud. So. Sit down, and tell me what you want to do about me." He moves the glass to the far side of the table, out of your way, and waits with both hands on his knees.