Chapter 6: Something Wrong with the Woman in the Window Seat

The woman arrived at half past two.

Aeron noticed her the way he noticed most things — not with the sudden arrest of attention but with the slow accumulation of peripheral detail, the way a tide comes in: imperceptibly, and then all at once. She took the window seat. She unwound a scarf — rust-coloured, wool, slightly fraying at one end in the manner of a thing that had been loved past its structural integrity. She settled her bag beneath her chair with the automatic efficiency of someone who had done this in this specific chair so many times that the motion had worn a groove in her muscle memory. She ordered Earl Grey without looking at the menu.

She opened a paperback crime novel. Its spine was cracked in multiple places. She had read it before.