“Thank you. For the munchie box.”
He almost smiled. Not the grin. The real thing, the one that lived underneath the grin and came out so rarely that seeing it felt like trespassing. “You’re welcome.”
The penthouse at night was quieter than Crag Manor. No wind noise, no gulls, just the distant hum of the city and the occasional siren and the Clyde moving through the dark below the glass. Ewan’s guest room was adjacent to his bedroom, separated by a wall of industrial glazing that was technically opaque and practically not – I could see the shape of light and movement through it, the silhouette of a man taking off a jacket and sitting on the edge of a bed and pressing his hands to his face in the gesture of someone who was exhausted and not ready to admit it.
I lay on the guest bed and I looked at the ceiling and I thought about the plan and the Wager and Al walking out and the wordleverageand the wordbaitand the difference between them, which was operationalaccording to Lachlan and irrelevant according to me and unbearable according to Al.
I got up. I went to Ewan’s door. I knocked.
He opened it immediately. Like he’d been standing there. Like he’d been waiting on the other side for the sound he’d already known was coming.
We didn’t sleep together. We stood in his doorway – him in a T-shirt and joggers, me in the clothes I’d been wearing all evening – and we looked at each other and the looking was enough. The looking was a promise of something that hadn’t happened yet and was going to happen eventually and neither of us was going to rush it.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Goodnight, Morven.”
He said my name the way he’d saidCairndhuat the trestle table – with sincerity, without performance, as though my name were a place he’d decided to belong to.
I went back to my room. I lay down. I didn’t sleep.
At 3AM there was a knock on my door.
I opened it. Al filled the doorframe. He was wearing the jacket he’d left in. His jaw was set. His eyes were complicated – tired and angry and something else, something that was not anger and not tiredness and had been eating itself alive behind his face for hours.
“I need you to know,” he said. His voice was a bass register with gravel underneath it and I could feel it in my sternum, in the place where sound becomes physical. “Whatever happens at the Wager. I won’t let it.”
“Let what?”
“Whatever they’re planning to do. Whatever goes wrong. Whatever Lachlan can’t account for.” He held my eyes. The intensity of it was physical – a weight against my face, a pressure in the air between us. “I won’t let it touch you.”
I looked at him – the man who walked behind me every morning and ate chips on a bench in silence and carried a newspaper clipping of a girl who had quietly commanded the eye, the man who had entered a burning building at seventeen and carried out a child he would spend twelve years protecting from a distance – and I said the only thing that was true.
“I know.”
The two words sat between us. They carried more weight than either of us could lift and we left them there, in the doorway, where they belonged.
He nodded. He turned. He walked down the corridor. His footsteps were measured, heavy. Each one placed with the care of a man who was using the act of walking to contain the thing inside him that wanted to stay.
I closed the door. I leaned against it. The wood was cold against my back and the city hummed below and the Clyde moved in the dark and I stood there for a long time, holding the intensity of the exchange the way you hold a note – with everything you have, until the breath runs out.
The breath didn’t run out. The note held. I went to bed.
I didn’t sleep. But the not-sleeping was different now. It was inhabited. The room was full of the weight of three men, and the weight was not captivity, and the not-captivity was the most frightening thing of all.
CHAPTER 21
The Alastair Confrontation
MORVEN
The light in the studio was the amber-grey of a Cairndhu winter night – the colour that happened when the cloud cover thinned enough to let the dock lights bleed through but not enough to call it moonlight. I almost turned back. I’d been lying in bed for two hours with my eyes open and my mind running the same circuit – the Wager, the plan, the cold chips, Al walking out of the room, and layered beneath all of it like a bass note I couldn’t stop hearing, the call from Ewan that afternoon: Isobel had been diagnosed. Pancreatic. The word sat in my chest like a stone. The woman who had taught me to stand had been told her body was failing, and the body – Isobel’s small, fierce, sixty-three-year-old body that still did barre every morning – had apparently known before the doctors did, because Ewan said she’d closed St.Jude’s a week ago and hadn’t told anyone why. The circuit had no exits, so I’d got up.
The corridor was dark. My feet were bare on thecarpet and my body knew the route – fourteen steps past the library door, left at the stairwell, through to the studio door that Lachlan kept unlocked for me now, the key replaced by the quiet, devastating permission of a man who had decided my access was no longer a concession but an expectation.
I pushed the door open.
He was sitting against the far mirror.
