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She nods once, as if that settles it, and only then does she come over to the table. She fills my cup first, a thin breath of steam curling into the air before she pours into her own and finally looks up. The moment our eyes meet, the ordinary errand is gone.

“Your da said Trinity’s done with you.”

No pity. No condemnation. Only honest curiosity, and something in that warms me.

I look up. “Aye.”

“For good?”

“For good.”

She studies my face, not fiercely, but thoroughly, as if she’s checking for a crack that should be there and isn’t. Her eyes flick once to my hands, to the way I keep turning the cup, and then back to my eyes.

“And that doesn’t trouble you?” she asks.

“It does,” I say. I take a breath and add, quieter, “But it doesnae change what I’d do.”

Ellen lets out a small huff. She sets her own cup down and leans a hip against the table, folding her arms. For a moment she says nothing, only watches me, and there’s something different in it now. No humour. Not judgement.

Assessment.

“You stood by Robert,” she says. Not a question.

“I did.”

“You could’ve kept yer head down.”

“I ken that.”

Her mouth tightens. “You could’ve let yer clever friend hang himself and kept yer own neck out of the noose.”

“Never,” I say, and this time there’s no carefulness to it. The word is out before I can polish it. “I would never do that.”

Ellen’s gaze holds mine, steady and unflinching. “Ye kent what it would cost.”

“I had a fair idea.”

It’s the truth, but it isn’t the whole of it. My fingers go still on the cup. My thoughts don’t.

“If we’d kept quiet,” I say, choosing these words deliberately, “if we’d bent our heads and waited it out, we might still be inside the gates. Might still have our place there.” I shake my head once. “Or we’d have been swallowed whole all the same, only quieter for it. Just more names on the list of men who kent better and pushed on, anyway. Dead, perhaps. Or living and dead all at once.”

Beneath all of that is a great deal of fear for Robert. I’m not afraid for him in the usual way. I’m afraid of him, of what he’ll do with that calm courage of his, as if his life is a shilling he can spend twice.

“And Robert…” I say, because it has to be spoken. “He looks at danger like it’s an argument he can win. Like his own skin is only another price to be paid if the cause is right.”

I flatten my hands on the table. The cup is forgotten.

I try to picture the other path and can’t hold it. One version where we make a difference, slow and small, enough to matter. Another where we’re ruined all the same, only quieter about it.

“I cannae tell whether that means the worst is past or whether it’s only beginnin’,” I admit. “I dinnae ken if there’s still something left to be done, or if this is the moment where the doin’ runs out and all that’s left is standin’ by what we’ve chosen.”

I watch as some tightly held part of her eases like a knot giving way.

“If I’d walked away,” I say quietly, “I’d’ve been leavin’ him to that alone. And I couldnae live with that.”

For a moment the only sound is the fire breathing under its ash, the rain still worrying the pane.

Then she reaches out and, tentative only for the space of a heartbeat, lays her hand over mine where it rests on the table. Warm and steady, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Her palm is callused in a way that tells the truth about her life, and the simple weight of it nearly undoes me.