“Fine like actually fine, or fine like you’re not wanting to talk about it?”
“The second one.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, tired and soft and completely his, and I had to look down at the table because it was the exact same laugh from every good memory I had of this flat and this town and this life I’d left behind. My fingers found the edge of the table and pressed hard.
I didn’t ask about the letter. Not yet. He was performing – moving around the kitchen with a vague, distracted energy that wasn’t quite right, and I knew that performance – I’d always had a knack for reading people through their bodies. Not a skill I’d learned; something older, something I’d been born with and the ballet had sharpened. A shift of weight. A breath drawn half a beat too early. The way a person held their shoulders when the thing they were carrying was inside them rather than in their hands. I’d read directors, partners, physiotherapists, rivals – everyone’s body told a different story from their mouth, and I’d spent my whole life trusting the body. Duncan’s body was telling me he was afraid of something that wasn’t in the room, and the performance of normality was costing him more than he could afford.
I let him make the tea. I sat at the table where theletter had been and I watched my father and I thought:what have you done?
I walked to the docks at dusk.
The cold was immediate and total – the kind of cold that doesn’t build but simply arrives, settling into the gap between my skin and my jeans, pressing against the scar tissue on my knee like a closed fist. I tapped my kneecap through the denim, a habit from physio that had become something closer to a tic.Still here. Still holding. Stop checking.
The water was black. The evening mist had started its slow creep inland, blurring the edges of the dockyards into something that looked almost painterly if you didn’t know what was underneath – the corroded cranes, the stripped-out hulls, the dock road with its potholes and its silence. Gulls circled overhead, arguing with the wind. Somewhere beyond the fuel depot, the lights of the Dockyard Lofts glowed amber through the fog.
A crowd had gathered at the bottom of the old slipway. Men, mostly – thick jackets, boots, the planted stance of working men who are pretending they’re watching something casually while caring about it very much. Dock Rugger. I’d forgotten about it until the sound came back to me – the heavy, wet thud of bodies hitting ground, the sharp whistle, the roar that went up when somebody did something either brilliant or violent, and in Cairndhu rugby those were often the same thing.
I stood at the edge. I didn’t go closer. The cold was doing its work on my knee now, the joint stiffening in the way the physio warned me about and the surgeon told me might never fully stop, and I shifted my weight to my right leg and watched from a distance.
That was when I saw him.
He wasn’t in the crowd. He was standing at its edge, the way a fence post stands at the edge of a field – separate from it, older than it, and going nowhere. He was massive. Even from forty yards I could tell that. He wore a faded rugby shirt with the sleeves pushed up over forearms that looked like they’d been carved from something denser than muscle, and he stood with his arms crossed over a chest that could have been a wall. His face was hard to read in the dying light, but his posture said everything: watchful, still, entirely planted.
He was looking at me.
Not at the match. Not at the crowd. At me. Standing on the dock road with my hands in my pockets and my broken suitcase twenty minutes behind me, and this man – this massive, unmoving man – was watching me the way you watch something you’ve been expecting. His gaze had weight. It landed on my skin the way the cold did – uninvited, immediate, impossible to shake off. I felt it in my collarbones, in the tight space at the base of my throat, and something in my stomach turned over – something adjacent to fear that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to examine.
I looked away first. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know him. But my pulse was doing something it hadn’t been doing thirty seconds ago, and the back of my neck prickled, and the cold on my knee sharpened, and I turned and walked back towards Clyde Crescent withthe fog closing in behind me and the sound of the match fading into the general noise of the docks at night. I walked quickly. I told myself it was the cold.
The flat was dark when I got back. Dad wasn’t home.
I turned on the kitchen light and stood in the doorway, still in my coat, and looked at the clean surfaces I’d made three hours ago. The kettle was cold. His mug sat rinsed on the draining board. The house was silent the way only an empty flat can be – not peaceful, just absent.
On the kitchen table, square in the centre, sat something that hadn’t been there when I left.
A playing card. Face up. The Ace of Spades.
No note. No explanation. Just the card, placed with deliberate care on the bare table, and the flat empty around it, and the fluorescent kitchen light humming overhead.
I picked it up. It was good stock – not a battered pub deck but proper card stock, heavy and smooth. The edges were razor-sharp. I turned it over. Nothing on the back.
I put it in my bag next to the Clyde Holdings letter and I checked the door lock and I sat on the sofa in the dark sitting room with my phone in my hand and listened to the building settle around me.
I didn’t call him. He wouldn’t answer. I knew that the way I knew the pattern of the cracks in this ceiling – from years of lying here in the dark and hoping something would change.
I slept on the sofa. My knee ached. Beyond the glass, the fog had swallowed Clyde Crescent whole, and the streetlamp outside had become a dim, yellow smear that pulsed when the wind shifted.
In the morning, Duncan still wasn’t home.
CHAPTER 2
The Debt
MORVEN
The pub was called The Rusty Hook, and the name was either a joke about the décor or a threat. I pushed the door open and walked in.
The smell hit first – stale lager, the chemical ghost of a mop bucket, and underneath it something older and meatier that I couldn’t name. Liniment, maybe. Or old sweat that had soaked into the floorboards so deep it had become part of the building.
