After

Three things happen in the week after the restoration that she doesn't expect, and none of them are supernatural.

The first: Joon-Ho sends her a probability model at seven in the morning on a Wednesday with a note that says this is not about you, I just thought you might find the methodology interesting. It's an analysis of historical Tide-worker accuracy in European financial markets over forty years, cross-referenced with Vein degradation events, and it is, in fact, genuinely interesting. She sends back two questions about the confidence intervals in section three. He responds within four minutes. By nine they've been emailing for two hours about Bayesian updating and supernatural ability variation, and she's at the kitchen table with her coffee going cold and Variable asleep across her feet, and it occurs to her that this is what it feels like when a conversation works because both people in it are actually thinking.

She doesn't tell him this is nice. She asks another question about section five.

He sends the response in three parts.

The second: Adaeze calls on Friday. Not about the Folklore, not about anything operational. She wants to know if there's a momentum pattern in the fraud cases that intersects with the 2023 European bond anomalies. It's the tone of a professional enquiry from someone who has decided to build the personal relationship on top of the professional one because the professional one is safer ground to start from, and she is, above most things, strategic about the order in which she does anything.

Send me your analysis, Veira tells her. I'll send you the fraud data.

They spend the afternoon on a shared document, the kind of work that requires both of them at full capacity, both trusting the other's reasoning, both willing to say no, that's wrong, look at this without softening it. Adaeze is wrong twice. Veira is wrong once. Neither of them apologises for being wrong. They correct and continue.

At six, Adaeze says: "Next week. I'll come up."

"The weather's going to be awful."

"I know. I've been to Edinburgh in December."

"Tuesday's better than Monday."

"Tuesday," Adaeze says.

The third is Emre.

He sends no emails. He calls once, briefly, to say the memory restoration can begin whenever she's ready and that there's no timeline and no pressure. He says it in the tone of a man who has rehearsed the call for the specific purpose of not saying anything additional, and she can hear the not-saying in the particular quality of the silence at the end of the sentence.

"I know," she says.

"Okay."

"Emre."

"Yes."

"Those two months. Whatever I remember when you give them back. I've decided in advance that they were good."

A pause. Then: "They were."

"I know that from the texture of them. I wanted you to confirm it."

"They were good," he says again.

"Okay."

She hangs up. She sits with her phone for a moment, then puts it face-down and goes back to the coastal essay she's been reading the one Sebastien sent eight months ago that she's been meaning to finish since the chapter on the Firth in autumn.

She finishes it.

Roman arrives on Saturday with two document cases, a bottle of wine, and the diary. He's spent the week drafting the formal petition to the Folklore council for Isadora's record reclassification and wants to go through the language with her. It takes four hours, involves real disagreement over three clauses, and turns into a conversation about historical accountability that runs until midnight.

He's better at going slowly this time. She notices. She doesn't say so.

At midnight she says: "The wine."

"I forgot about it."

"Amateur."

He finds two glasses in the kitchen cupboard and pours. She looks at the petition draft on the table beside the diary, and she thinks about Isadora, twenty-six years old, writing in a language that would outlast everyone she knew, afraid of being misread.

"She'll get the record she deserves," she says.

"Because of you."

"Because of her. I'm just fixing the filing."

He looks at her over his glass. "You know that's not what this is."

"I know," she says. "I just prefer modest framing when I can manage it."

"I've noticed."

"It's a useful quality."

"It is, when it's genuine." A pause. "Sometimes it's protection."

She looks at him. He looks back. Midnight in the cottage, the sea faintly audible, Variable somewhere in the dark on his night patrol, and she thinks about Vienna, four hours and no room between pieces, and then she thinks about this: two people at a kitchen table with wine, and nothing required from the moment except the moment.

"This is better," she says.

"Considerably better."

"We should do it more often."

"I'm available most evenings."

"You're three hundred and twelve years old. You're available all evenings."

"That is an accurate observation," he says, and she refills his glass.