Two days later James pulled his coat out of the hot press and laid it over the back of a kitchen chair, and Nyra stopped talking mid-sentence.
She had been halfway through something about a rabbit. Her eyes went to the coat, then to the boots by the door with the laces already loosened off, then to the flat leather case on the table that he only ever took one place.
Her feet came down off the rung of her chair.
"You're going up."
"Tonight, yeah."
"Which one?"
"Twenty-six."
She did not say anything about that. She just watched him check the case, and go through it, and close it, and her spoon stayed where it was in the bowl.
Alice was at the other end of the table with her wings folded down the back of the chair and a broken halo hanging dark behind her head, working her way through a second slice of toast with the concentration of a woman conducting an experiment.
She had not put anything away since the outing. Not once, not for anybody.
