Chapter 19: Nessa and the Institute, Reconstructed

The document arrives at half past nine in the morning.

Callum hears the letterbox go and does not move. He is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug he has not drunk from and Vera's copied journal open in front of him at a page he has not been reading. Vera is asleep — the particular daytime stillness of her, not quiet but absent, the way a room feels when something large has vacated it. Edmund is somewhere upstairs. The flat has the quality it sometimes has in the early morning, after difficult nights: not peaceful, exactly, but emptied out, the residue of everything said settling like sediment.

He hears the letterbox a second time. Whoever has pushed something through has let the flap fall and then caught it before it could clatter, which means they are being careful. He stands.