The Father

Callum Morrow's Stockbridge address takes Sebastien fourteen minutes to find and forty-eight hours to act on.

Niall runs it down through council tax records and a postcode and the Edinburgh phenomenon of a city small enough that someone always knows someone. Stockbridge. A quiet terrace off St. Stephen Street, window boxes, residents who nod to each other in the mornings, the particular settled character of a street that has been itself for a long time and intends to continue.

Sebastien goes alone.

The door opens before he rings. Callum Morrow is in the doorframe with the expression of a man who has been expecting this specific visitor for some time and has decided to stop pretending otherwise. He is not what Sebastien expected, though he should have been the Arthurs Seat bench, the dark coat, the practiced stillness. Up close he is simply a man in his late fifties who carries thirty years in his face the way certain landscapes carry weather: not visibly, not performatively, just present.

He makes tea. They sit in a front room that is modest and specific the room of someone who has lived carefully and deliberately, chosen each thing in it. A good chair. Books that have been read rather than displayed. One photograph on the mantelpiece.

"You sent the email," Sebastien says.

"Yes."

"The dormant Foundation account."

"I built it before I disappeared. I knew that one day something would happen that required her to have information she couldn't receive from a living source." He wraps both hands around the mug. "I built myself a dead man's mailbox."

"And Florence was the moment."

"Florence was the moment I stopped being able to justify silence."

Sebastien looks at him. He says: "Did you know what she was. From the beginning."

Callum is quiet for a moment. Then: "The scan result came back when Eilidh was eleven weeks pregnant. The geneticists knew immediately. I knew immediately. Hybrid configuration full conduit potential, all five bloodline resonances present, the specific cellular structure the historical records associate with Vein conductance." He looks at his tea. "I have known what my daughter is since before she was born."

"She doesn't know you're alive."

"She does now."

Sebastien looks up.

"She's been in the Borders village for two weeks. I went two days ago. She was waiting for me she'd identified me from the Tide-worker lineage records Roman gave her access to in Vienna. She worked out that the death documentation had the specific characteristics of a fabrication." He pauses. "She is very good at what she does."

"What did she say."

Callum looks at the mantelpiece photograph. He says: "She made coffee. She sat me down. She said she would listen and after that we'd see." Something quiet in his voice that is not performative. "It was the most frightening conversation I've ever had, and I say that as a man who has spent thirty years afraid."

"Is she alright."

"She is the most specifically alright person I have ever met. That's not the same as fine. But she is alright in the way of someone who has looked at a very large thing clearly and decided what to do about it." He looks at Sebastien. "She's setting the terms. She's decided who she'll see and in what order. She asked me to tell you that."

Sebastien sits in the careful front room in Stockbridge and thinks about a woman on a cliff path above the sea, thinking. He thinks about what she is thinking about. He thinks about fifty-one days.

He says: "What does she want."

Callum looks at him. It is a very direct look, the look of a man who has been waiting for precisely this question for a very long time and has strong feelings about how long it took to be asked.

He says: "That is the first sensible question anyone in this entire situation has asked about her."

Sebastien holds his gaze.

"She wants the complete truth," Callum says. "In the order she sets, without anyone deciding which parts she's ready for. She wants the people who managed her to say what they did plainly, without framing it as love. She wants her memory back." He pauses. "And she wants to make a real decision. Not one shaped by people who've arranged the variables in advance. A genuine, fully-informed, entirely her own decision."

"About the Vein."

"About everything."

Sebastien stands. He picks up his coat. He looks at the photograph on the mantelpiece longer this time, long enough to see it properly. A woman, dark-haired, laughing at something off-camera. The laugh reorganises her whole face. He has seen that laugh somewhere recently. He has been thinking about it with more frequency than he's examined.

He says: "Tell her I'd like to come when she's ready."

"She'll contact you," Callum says. "And when she does don't prepare what you'll say. If you have one chance with her, it's only the honest one."

He sees Sebastien to the door.

Sebastien walks back through Stockbridge in the November evening, lights coming on in the window boxes, the city doing its early-dark thing, and he thinks about six months of an intelligence report in a desk drawer and the specific, available cowardice of deciding tomorrow is a better day to be honest.

He goes back to the Greymantle house. He opens the desk drawer. He takes out the intelligence report and holds it for a moment the weight of all the times he's read it, all the times he's decided not to act on it and then he puts it in the bin.

He picks up his phone. One message, to a number he's had for six months and has never used:

I'm ready to be honest with you. Whenever you're ready to hear it.

He puts the phone face-down on his desk.

He waits.