Grant does not sleep the first night in the Ashworth house. He sits in a chair pulled close to Edmund’s bed and watches the old man’s chest rise and fall under the thin light of a single lamp left on for the night staff who never quite enter the room once Imogen has dismissed them. The air holds the clean, expensive scent of starched linen and something floral that has been carefully chosen to mask the sharper edges of illness. Grant ignores both. He is listening for the small changes that matter more than any monitor: the catch in a breath that arrives a fraction too late, the way the fingers on the left hand twitch once every twelve minutes as if searching for a pulse that no longer belongs entirely to their owner.Imogen returns at half past two with two cups of coffee neither of them will drink. She does not apologize for the hour. She simply sets one cup on the side table and takes the chair opposite him, coat still on, as though she has not yet decided whether this house is safe