Chapter Thirty-Eight

Callum was walking back to his car, three weeks after the story ran, the harbour quiet under a hard January sky, when a man he didn’t recognise fell into step beside him on the harbour road — seventy-odd, weathered, unhurried, moving with the particular quiet economy of a man entirely used to not being noticed, the specific stillness Callum had come, across two months, to recognise as belonging to people who had spent a long career learning exactly how much of themselves it was safe to show a stranger.