Melissa was quiet for a long moment after Raymond finished speaking.She was looking at him, but her eyes had the distant quality of someone who is simultaneously present in the conversation and somewhere else entirely—somewhere inside her own memory, moving through years of accumulated impressions, testing what Raymond had said against everything she knew about her uncle and finding the collision between the two deeply uncomfortable.Because she knew Raymond was serious.She knew he was not the kind of person who said things for effect, who exaggerated for drama, who built accusations out of nothing. She had seen enough of him by now to understand that when Raymond spoke with that particular quiet certainty, it was because he had a foundation beneath his words that he trusted absolutely.But she also knew her uncle.Or believed she did.She thought about him—the real, specific, human version of him that she had grown up alongside. Not the abstract figure that Raymond's words were pai