"I'm glad we're here."
A pause.
Alistair turned.
He looked at Tav with the amber eyes and the morning expression — the unguarded one, the one that lived in this hour.
"Yes," he said. "Me too."
The coffee. The morning. The sea.
Eleven days until the inquiry.
Whatever came after: together.
• • •
• • •
On the eleventh morning, the coast was clear.
Not in the operational sense — the coast had been clear since their arrival, the remoteness of the safehouse, making it one of the more genuinely secure locations either of them had occupied in their professional lives. Clear in the meteorological sense: the rain that had occupied the previous two days had moved on and left behind the coastal light that appeared after weather, when the air had been rinsed of everything accumulated and the world showed its actual colors.
Grey and blue and the foaming white of breaking waves.
Tav stood on the cliff path at seven in the morning and watched the light on the water.
He had been doing this for eight days. The routine of the safe house had established itself with the ease of routines that were not performed but emerged: waking early, coffee, the cliff path when the weather allowed, reading or reviewing the testimony notes in the late morning, the shared meals that Alistair had taken as his domain with the calm ownership he brought to kitchens. Evening at the fire. Sleep at a reasonable hour.
Simple.
He had not had simple in a very long time.
He had not understood, before this, how much the absence of simple had cost. He had been managing complex for nine years and had forgotten what it felt like to have a day that was simply what it was: a day, with coffee and sea air and a person who made things better than required in a kitchen that was temporarily theirs.
Alistair appeared at the path's beginning.
He had the sketchbook and the coffee, both carried; he walked several times and knew which hand went were.
He fell into step.
They walked.
The inquiry was in six days. Naomi would arrive tomorrow. Lucien was coming back from his two days of solitary along the coast with the archive's aftermath. Phase Two was waiting, with its unknown shape and its unknown terms.
All of that was real. All of it was coming.
This morning was also real.
The cliff path at seven in the morning, in winter, on the clear day after the rain. The sea. The light.
The person beside him with the sketchbook, who would draw something today and show him later, and whose presence was the single most reliable good fact of the last several months.
Tav watched the water.
He thought: at least 200 pages. At least this much of it.
He thought: I'll take as many as I can get.
