Chapter 12: Seren's Unfinished Conversation

The rain held off, which Evander took as a small, unearned mercy.

He had not been able to sleep — which was not unusual, had not been unusual for years, but tonight had a different texture to it, less the familiar low-grade vigilance of a person who had trained himself to remain lightly alert and more a specific, named unease he could not dismiss into the background the way he had learned to dismiss most things. The folder sat on his kitchen table. Ptolemy sat on his kitchen table beside the folder, which Evander had told him not to do three times and had since stopped bothering about. He had lain in bed for forty minutes looking at the ceiling and cataloguing the sounds of the building — the pipes contracting, the wind off the harbor moving through the gap above the bathroom window that the landlord had been going to seal for eight months — and then he had gotten up and put on his jacket and gone out.

Seren was already on the waterfront when he got there.