Page 9

“See? I know things,” Hex says.

“You guessed,” Dis says.

“I knew,” Hex says.

“You have never known a fact in your life,” Dis says. “You simply say things with confidence until they turn out to be true, which is a different skill entirely, and not one I respect.”

The next question goes to Adam, history, one about the Tudors, and Adam answers it so quietly and so correctly that Felix actually applauds, two claps that make Adam duck his head and go faintly pink.

“Stop apologising for knowing things,” Felix tells him.

“I don’t want to seem like I’m showing off,” Adam says.

“You’re playing trivia,” Felix says. “Showing off is the entire point of the game.”

I catch myself grinning at the pair of them, thinking that if this is what a normal life looks like for everyone else at this table, I’ve genuinely landed on my feet finding my way into it.

The game tightens as it goes. Dis pulls ahead early, then Hex gets three questions right in a row, through what he insists is skill and Dis insists is blind luck. By the time the last card comes up, the two rivals are level, everyone leaning forward slightly without seeming to notice they’re doing it.

“If Dis gets this right, he’s won,” Felix announces, holding the card with obvious relish. “Category, mythology. Name the river that separates the world of the living from the underworld in Greek myth.”

Silence. Hex opens his mouth, and Dis holds a hand up without looking at him, a silencing gesture so instinctive it must be years old.

“Let me think,” Dis says.

I feel my shadow shift beside me, leaning in almost imperceptibly, and when he speaks it’s pitched low, just for me, threaded under the argument still going on across the table.

“The Styx,” he murmurs.

I don’t say it out loud. It’s not my question to answer. But I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face, delighted all over again by the sound of him, the low private hum of it meant for nobody but me in a room full of noise.

“The Styx,” Dis announces finally, with the confidence of a man who has clearly reached the same conclusion several seconds too slowly to claim it looked easy.

Felix checks the card. “Correct.”

The table erupts. Hex loudly claims partial credit for staying quiet long enough to let Dis think. Adam laughs into his hands. Felix declares the game a draw on a technicality nobody quite follows. Dis sits back in his chair with the quiet, monumental satisfaction of a man who’s just proven something to himself as much as to anyone else.

“We should cut the cake,” Dis says, once the noise settles, standing and smoothing his apron like the whole evening has simply been leading up to this moment.

He slices it properly, formally, with the concentration of a surgeon, measuring each portion with a small ruler he produces from somewhere Felix insists doesn’t bear thinking about. Nobody argues with the ruler. The cake, when it comes, is extraordinary, sharp and bright and perfectly balanced, and even Hex says so, grudgingly, which from Hex to Dis counts as a rave review.

We leave late, the four of us spilling out onto the pavement in stages. Adam and Hex peel off first towards their own door two houses down, calling goodnights over their shoulders.

I linger a moment on the step, my shadow beside me, and think, giddily, that I’ve had a rather extraordinary evening for something that started with someone else’s ruined pastry.

Chapter 5

Terrible Toast.

Everyone’s gone home for Easter, which means the flat’s gone properly quiet in a way it never does during term. There are six of us on this corridor, each with our own room and our own little ensuite, all of us sharing the kitchen at the end. For the past week that kitchen’s belonged entirely to me, abandoned mid tidy, a lone forgotten mug still sitting on the drying rack that nobody’s claimed in four days. Hannah went back to Yorkshire on Friday, hugging me goodbye like we were parting for a year rather than a fortnight. The others trickled off one by one over the days before that, and the whole flat’s been mine alone ever since. Echoing slightly, the sort of quiet that takes a bit of getting used to after a term of five other people’s kettles and five other people’s washing up.

I like it, mostly. There’s something peaceful about having a whole kitchen to myself, nobody’s washing up but mine, nobody’s opinions on the thermostat but mine. I’ve spent the last few evenings doing very little, curled up with revision notes I’m not really reading. The sort of low, undemanding quiet I don’t think I’ve properly had since before university started. Longer, actually. As in probably never. The commune was lots of things, but quiet and personal space weren’t one of them.

There’s also, for the first time since September, nobody whose grades I need to protect from an ancient shadow lord loitering in the corner.

“You can come in,” I tell him, standing in the doorway with my arms crossed like I’m announcing something enormously significant, which, I suppose, I am. “Nobody’s here to be alarmed by you.”

There’s a pause, the kind that means he’s turning the offer over carefully, checking it for hidden edges.