The estate looked exactly as they had left it.

Which was, Mailah realized, slightly unreasonable. Ten days was long enough for things to change — for Theron’s extraction to be completed, for security rotations to be adjusted, for the greenhouse ruins to be cleared to whatever state the grounds crew had decided was acceptable. The iron bones of the frame were still standing when their car came up the drive. Someone had planted something in the cleared interior. She could see it from the window — low, green, deliberate.

Grayson saw it too.

He said nothing. But his eyes stayed on it as the car passed.

---

Lucson was in the front hall.

Not waiting — Lucson didn’t wait in the obvious sense. He was simply there, standing with a folder and the expression of a man who had been running things competently for ten days and had a list of things to discuss and a specific opinion about the appropriate timeline for discussing them.

He looked at Grayson.

He looked at Mailah.

He looked at the gardening book under her arm.

He said nothing about the gardening book, which told her everything about the quality of Lucson’s self-control.

"Theron’s extraction completed four days ago," he said, to Grayson. "The realm has him. Sentencing is underway." He held out the folder. "The rest can wait until morning."

Grayson took the folder without opening it. "Carson?"

"Out. He’ll be back tonight." Lucson paused. "He knows you’re coming. He’s been — anticipatory."

"Meaning he has something prepared."

"Meaning he’s been insufferable for three days and I would appreciate if you spoke to him."

Grayson’s jaw shifted. "Tomorrow."

Lucson glanced at Mailah again — the particular glance of a man updating a record — and then turned and walked back toward the east wing with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had done everything that needed doing and was now doing them the courtesy of leaving.

Mailah watched him go. "That was almost warm."

"That was Lucson," Grayson said, already moving toward the stairs.

She followed. "The folder."

"Can wait until morning."

"You said that. I’m just noting that you meant it."

He looked at her briefly over his shoulder. "I’ve been gone ten days. The estate is standing. Theron is contained. Everything else is paperwork." He continued up the stairs. "Paperwork can wait."

She followed him up the stairs — the main staircase, which Morrison had cleared her for some time ago and which Grayson was now using without the east-corridor detour.

---

The bedroom was exactly as she had left it.

Which meant Mrs. Baker had seen to it — fresh linens, the lamp at its usual position, the bedside table cleared and reset as if it was intentionally made ready for their return.

There was a small vase on the windowsill.

Lavender.

Mailah stopped.

She looked at it. Then at Grayson, who was setting Lucson’s folder on the desk, putting it aside.

"Mrs. Baker," she said.

"Presumably," he said.

"She put lavender in the room."

He looked at the vase. His expression did the slow-shift thing, barely perceptible, there and gone.

"I may have mentioned," he said, "in the note to her about the runner beans, that lavender had been — useful. For concentration."

She stared at him.

"It was a logistical note," he said. "I was describing environmental factors."

"You told Mrs. Baker that lavender helped your concentration."

"I mentioned it in passing."

"Grayson."

"It was a single sentence," he said, with the composure of a man who had said something and was not going to retreat from it. "In a longer communication. About beans."

She looked at the lavender. Small, purple, sitting in its vase with complete indifference to the significance being attributed to it.

She set the gardening book on the desk beside Lucson’s folder — the two items together forming a specific portrait of the last ten days — and said nothing.

He crossed to the window and looked out at the grounds. The cleared greenhouse interior was visible from here — she could see the plantings more clearly now, low and deliberate, in rows that suggested someone with an opinion about spacing.

"What did they plant?" she asked.

"I don’t know yet." He looked at it for a moment. "Something low. Ground cover, maybe." A pause. "I’ll look tomorrow."

"Before or after the paperwork."

"Before," he said, without hesitation, and she heard the small, specific shift in that.6

She sat on the edge of the bed and watched him stand at the window. He was back in his estate context — the jacket, the composure, the weight of the house around him — but something was different in the set of his shoulders. Not relaxed, exactly. More like a man who had put something down for ten days and had come back and picked it up again and found it lighter than he remembered.

"Carson’s going to be terrible," she said.

"Yes."

"What do you think he has prepared?"

"Something that will require me to threaten him within the first five minutes of conversation." He turned from the window. "That’s his standard operating mode."

"And Mason?"

"Mason will look at you and then at me and then back at his book and not say anything for three days and then make one observation that is entirely accurate and deeply unwelcome." He said this without heat. Just the assessment.

"Ravenson?"

"Ravenson will wait. He always does." He crossed to the desk and picked up the folder, looked at the cover, and set it back down. "He’ll want to understand what changed before he decides what to do with it."

"And what changed?"

He looked at her. Direct, unhurried.

"Everything that needed to," he said.

---

Carson arrived at half past nine.

Mailah heard him before she saw him.

He came into the sitting room where she and Grayson were, stopped in the doorway with the expression of a man delivering a verdict, looked at the gardening book on the side table, and pointed at it.

"Is that a gardening book," he said.

"Yes," Grayson said.

"A coastal gardening book."

"Specifically for Welsh coastal conditions," Grayson said, with complete equanimity.

Carson stared at it. Then at Grayson. Then at Mailah. Then back at the book with the expression of someone whose prepared entrance had been entirely derailed by a paperback guide to horticulture.

"I had a speech," Carson said.

"I’m sure it was good," Mailah said.

"It was excellent. I had a whole — there was a structure to it." He gestured vaguely at the air where the structure had been. "And now there’s a gardening book."

"Yes. So?," Grayson confirmed.

Carson sat down heavily in the nearest chair and looked at his brother with undisguised fascination.

"You actually went," he said.

"Yes."

"To a cottage, I presume."

"Yes."

"In Wales."

"Welsh coastal conditions," Grayson said, "are specific. The book accounts for them."

Carson looked at Mailah. "Did he — was he—"

"He incinerated an egg," she said. "And a mackerel."

"Separately," Grayson said. "Different incidents."

Carson looked between them. Something moved across his face — not mockery, she realized. Something closer to relief, which he was covering with the closest available expression, which happened to be amusement.

"The egg," he said.

"Left burner," Grayson said. "It runs hotter."

"Of course it does." Carson pressed his hand over his mouth for a moment. When he removed it, he had more or less composed himself.

He looked at his brother with an expression she hadn’t seen from him before — something genuine underneath the theater.

"You seem different," Carson said.

"I am different," Grayson said. Simple. Certain.

Carson absorbed this. He nodded once, slowly, like a man accepting the results of an experiment he had been running for a long time. "Good different or terrifying different."

"Both," Grayson said.

"Right." Carson stood up. He looked at the gardening book one more time. Then he looked at Mailah with an expression that was the closest thing to sincerity she had seen from him. "Welcome back," he said. "We were — it was—" He stopped. "The estate was quiet."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said," she told him.

"Don’t tell Lucson. He’ll think I’ve gone soft." He headed for the door, then stopped. "The courtyard," he said, over his shoulder, to Grayson. "The grounds crew put lavender in the greenhouse. Mrs. Baker said you wanted it."

"I mentioned it in passing," Grayson said.

"Right." Carson didn’t turn around. "They planted forty square meters of it." A pause. "Just so you know. In case that’s too much lavender."

He left.

Mailah looked at Grayson.

Forty square meters.

He was looking at the middle distance with the expression of a man who had written a logistical note about beans and lavender and concentration and was now recalibrating the scope of Mrs. Baker’s interpretation.

"A single sentence," she said.

"In a longer communication," he said.

"About beans."

"About beans," he confirmed, and the almost-smile arrived, fully present, entirely unmanaged, the best version of it she had seen — not held back, not filed, just there.

She picked up the gardening book and held it out to him.

He took it.

"The courtyard," she said.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Before the paperwork."

"Before the paperwork," she agreed.

Outside, the estate made its evening sounds — the patrol completing its circuit, the house settling into the night, the grounds quiet under the first stars. Somewhere in the courtyard, forty square meters of lavender was presumably doing whatever lavender did in the dark.

He set the book on the desk beside the folder and the vase and the small accumulation of things that were, collectively, the evidence of ten days and whatever came next.

Then he turned and looked at her with the particular steadiness that she had come to understand was his version of everything he wasn’t going to say.

She looked back.

"Bed," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"Not a tactical discussion."

"No."

"Or a security briefing."

"Mailah."

"Or a structural assessment of the lavender placement—"

He crossed the room, took her face in both hands with the familiar certainty, and kissed her quiet.

The estate settled around them.

The lavender waited in the courtyard.

The folder sat on the desk, unopened, doing its paperwork in the dark, alone and entirely unattended.