“I’ll take care of it,” he says again, softer, and I decide—for now, for this breakfast, for this boy who is discussing whether dragons like marmalade—that I will let him.
23
DECLAN
After breakfast I rinse honey from Liam’s fingers at the sink, kiss the crown of his head, and tell Aoife the shape of my day as if I can will it into something ordinary.
“Union steward at the south pier,” I say, drying my hands. “A shipping dispute I don’t want turning into a brawl. Then a sit-down with a banker who forgets the difference between loan and tribute when the holidays come. I’ll be back before service.”
She watches me over the rim of her mug, steam fogging the faint crescent of sleep still clinging to her lashes. “Try ‘before prep,’” she says. “It sounds less like you’re timing yourself against a gun.”
“Before prep,” I repeat, because she’s right and because the boy is listening.
Liam raises his jam-smeared dragon-tail of toast. “Victory,” he decrees. We salute him with coffee and milk. For a minute the kitchen is only bread and quiet and the small clank of a spoon against a cup.
When they turn to the sink, I slip the heavy envelope from my cardigan and cross to the study off the hall, door not quite shut. A habit, private, but not theatrical. The paper is thick, the kind ofstock that wants to bruise when folded. My name isn’t on it. Only hers.Aoife Kelly.
I break the seal with a thumbnail and slide the letter free. Handwriting, old-fashioned. Flourishes tight at the corners like thorny vines. The ink is iron-gall—my grandfather used it. It bites the air with that metallic tang. Four short lines, each cramped, each ending with a tidy dot like a nail head.
Flame finds silver, silver sings.
When knives learn hymns in kitchens.
Wren-girls climb too far and fall.
Pine and needle—holy, listen.
I read it twice, then again, because there are messages that change under light. Flame and silver. Knives and kitchens. Wren-girls. Pine. Needle. The cadence is wrong for a priest and too performative for a butcher. It smells of someone who believes themselves clever.
I don’t carry it back to the table. I don’t carry it to the office. I strike a match over the sink. The letter blackens at the edge and curls like a leaf in drought. Ash blooms and drops into a ring around the drain. When the flame reaches the last line—holy, listen—I let it go and turn on the tap. The ash swims and vanishes.
I clean the basin until no shadow remains. I put the brass matchbox back on the windowsill. When I return to the kitchen, Aoife is wiping a streak of jam from Liam’s cheek and arguing with him about whether dragons prefer marmalade. I rub a hand over the back of my neck and say lightly, “Bankers, then saints,” and kiss her temple.
“Try not to mix them up,” she says, and the smile she gives me is cautious but real.
My heart is too heavy so I do what I do best and get to work, outside.
By late afternoon, the docks smell like wet rope and diesel. I walk the lines with Kieran—storm-weather checks, roster checks, the small talk that keeps the peace from getting brittle. We head off a flare-up before it finds flame. A foreman gets a different shift. A grievance gets its envelope. Work, not theater. The kind of day I tell myself I prefer.
At five I am back on Hanover, collar cold from the sea air, coat damp enough to hold the scent of it. I do what I always do—pause across from The Green Hearth and count windows, cars, strangers who don’t belong. The unmarked sedan I put at the back door is where it should be. Eddie gives me the small nod that means Nothing moved we didn’t move first. I nod back and go in through the alley.
Prep hums like a machine with its teeth just oiled. Metal on wood, the hiss of a pan deglazing, laughter like cutlery. Aoife is bent over a hotel pan, wrist snapping quick as she finishes a tray of potato rosettes with a thin line of sour cream and smoked salt. She doesn’t look up, but I see the way the corner of her mouth twitches. She knows I’m here.
“Five minutes,” she says to the room without turning, which is her way of telling me to keep my distance and my pride. I take the far wall, out of traffic, and watch her call the symphony. “Yes, Oscar, more lemon. No, Nessa’s on the mirepoix—where is Nessa?”
Heads pivot. Someone says, “She texted she’d be late,” and the words fall wrong. Nessa is never late.
Aoife’s shoulders notch tighter by a fraction. “She’ll be here,” she says, to her people more than to me. “Someone ping her again. Lids on. We’re not running a nursery.”
Service hits hard at six. I keep to my corner and let her work, a king who knows better than to climb onto the line. Somewherebetween the second and third seating, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
Eddie:She didn’t clock in. Apartment dark. No answer.
A breath later, another text from a bartender I keep on retainer two blocks over.Girl in a green jacket walking south toward the river at five-thirty. Alone.
Cold opens in my chest. I don’t leave my post. I send two men to sweep the waterfront quietly. I have a third ring her phone from a number she’ll answer. It goes to voicemail.
At nine thirty, service ebbs just enough to let us pretend the rest of the world exists. Aoife brushes flour from her forearms and comes to stand beside me, eyes flicking up once, ready to tease me about the way I lean like a gargoyle. I don’t make her ask.
