Chapter 9
By the time Cian pushed open the door of The Lantern, damp had already worked through his coat to his shoulders.
He had checked the clock in the car twice in the last three minutes, as though arriving exactly on time might make him less obvious.
The café windows were fogged by the difference between the grey air outside and the warmth within, turning the street into watercolour blurs of headlights and wet coats.
Inside, mugs knocked softly behind the counter.
Milk steamed. Someone laughed near the pastry case.
It all felt too ordinary for the amount of care it took not to expect too much.
Ivy had beaten them there.
She was kneeling on one of the bentwood chairs in the corner booth with a length of curled receipt paper trailing over the table and into her lap like a paper river.
Sukhi, with the serene efficiency of a woman who could manage caffeine, grief, and weather in the same shift, wiped down the neighbouring table one-handed while sliding another intact receipt roll toward Ivy without comment.
“That one’s sturdier,” she said. “For architecture.”
Ivy accepted this as if it were a matter of engineering standards. “I’m making a hospital castle.”
Hadley was beside her, one hand steadying the spill of paper before it could drag a sugar jar to its death.
She looked up at the sound of the door. There were shadows under her eyes that no amount of sleep would have solved yet, but the sight of him did not sharpen her face the way it had a week ago.
He took off his coat more carefully than necessary.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I’m on time.”
Hadley glanced at the wall clock. “By forty seconds. That’s almost reckless.”
It took him a beat to recognise the line as a joke, and in that beat she smiled—small, quick, but real enough to make him forget the rain still clinging to his sleeves.
Sukhi appeared in front of him with a mug before he could order. “Coffee. No sugar. And the tea for her is already steeping because she’ll forget to ask until it’s too bitter.”
Hadley looked mildly affronted. “I do not forget.”
“You do,” Sukhi said. “Take the sugar before the decision.”
A butter cookie landed on the saucer beside Hadley’s tea. Another appeared next to Cian’s coffee after the slightest pause, as though Sukhi had assessed him and found him one inconvenience from trouble.
He sat across from Ivy while Hadley slid in beside her. The booth was narrow enough that their sleeves nearly brushed when they both leaned to rescue the same collapsing paper tower.
“It needs another wing,” Ivy declared.
“Most new construction does,” Hadley said.
Cian studied the arrangement of receipt-roll walls, stir-stick bridges, and sugar-packet steps. “What’s in the tower?”
“The dragon,” Ivy said at once.
Hadley frowned. “Hospitals don’t usually keep a dragon.”
“This one does. She’s nice.”
“That seems like an important policy distinction,” Cian said gravely.
Ivy gave him a look suggesting she was willing to overlook his ignorance this once. “She only bites mean people.”
“Efficient,” Hadley murmured.
There it was again—the dry edge under the fatigue, not weaponised now, just alive. Cian had seen her efficient, angry, frightened, overprepared, grieving to the point of shaking. He had not seen her like this before, amused without bracing for whatever came next.
He took a careful sip of coffee and let the warmth settle him. “How many towers does the dragon get?”
“Three. For watching.”
“Of course.”
Hadley tucked a loose piece of paper back onto the table. “She added a helipad earlier.”
“Emergency access,” Ivy said.
Sukhi, passing with a tray, nodded approval. “No sense building pretty if people can’t get where they need to go.”
The sentence carried the shape of town truth the way things often did here—practical on the surface, pointed underneath. Cian glanced at Hadley, half-expecting her to close around the implication. Instead she was watching Ivy fold the receipt paper into a pointed roof.
“She’s been drawing floor plans at breakfast,” Hadley said.
Ivy did not look up. “Only because the lodge hallway is badly arranged.”
“It is not badly arranged,” Hadley said.
“It squeaks in the middle and the lamp is too close to the little table.”
Cian smiled into his mug. “You’ve made a full assessment.”
“She assesses everything,” Hadley said, but there was a softness under it that changed the sentence entirely. “She’ll move crackers into categories before she eats them.”
“Only if they’re mixed.”
“And if her sock seam twists,” Hadley added, “nothing else can happen until that injustice is corrected.”
Cian looked at Ivy. “You line your books up by size before bed.”
Ivy finally glanced between them, suspicious. “How do you know that?”
He lifted one shoulder. “I noticed.”
Hadley’s fingers stilled on the edge of the receipt roll. Not alarm. Not quite surprise. Her hand just rested there, and he knew he had said more than he meant to.
“She hums when she’s tired,” Cian said, because there was no neat way back now. “Not songs. Just one note for a while.”
Hadley laughed softly through her nose. “She does.”
Ivy, who had the good sense to find adult feelings mildly embarrassing, pushed a sugar packet toward him. “Make stairs.”
He obeyed. Across the table, Hadley wrapped both hands around her tea. Her hair was slightly damp at the temples from the weather. A strand had worked loose near her cheek. He had no business noticing that. He noticed anyway.
“She still won’t eat the crusts on grilled cheese if they’re too dark,” he said.
Hadley blinked. “You know that already?”
“She tells me things,” Ivy said, with the majesty of someone explaining weather patterns to the underqualified.
Neither of them answered at once. Hadley looked down at her cup. Cian set his coffee down more carefully than necessary.
Ivy, unaware or kindly pretending to be, added a second tower to the paper hospital and asked, “Are you coming on Wednesday too?”
Cian kept his voice even. “That’s the plan.”
“Good.” She pressed a stir-stick bridge into place. “Because dragons need consistency.”
Sukhi laughed from behind the counter, though Cian could not tell how much she had heard. In this town, probably all of it.
Hadley’s mouth curved then—really curved, not the brief guarded thing from before. The change was enough to make him lose track of the next thing he had meant to say. The laugh that followed was low and unguarded, and full enough that Ivy looked up, pleased with herself for causing it.
Hadley noticed. Colour rose faintly at her throat, but she did not retreat from it. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That sounded very much like something.”
He should have chosen a safer answer. “I hadn’t heard you laugh like that yet.”
For one suspended beat he thought he had overstepped. Then her face gentled instead of closing.
“Neither had I,” she said quietly.
Ivy held up the final receipt-roll tower. “Done.”
It listed dangerously to one side. Cian reached to steady the base while Hadley anchored the top, and their hands met in the paper shadow of Ivy’s dragon hospital. It was hardly a touch at all. Still, both of them went still.
Ivy squinted at them. “You have to hold it at the same time or it falls.”
“Noted,” Hadley said.
They did.
By the time they left, the rain had thinned to a pearled mist that silvered the streetlights and left the hill toward Tideview shining.
Ivy insisted on carrying the shortest surviving strip of receipt paper because it was now, apparently, the official blueprint.
Cian took the heavier bag without being asked.
Hadley did not argue. That unsettled him more than if she had.
Tideview Lodge held warmth the way old houses did, imperfectly and with character.
The front hall smelled of line-dried cotton, lavender starch, and soup from some unseen pot in the kitchen.
Quilts folded over the parlour chair backs looked as though they had known many winters and outlasted all of them.
Marta de la Vega stood at the foot of the stairs with a box under one arm and the expression of a field marshal conducting a campaign involving laundry.
“Excellent,” she said when she saw them. “Additional hands.”
Hadley stopped short. “Marta—”
“Rest first. Explain after,” Marta said, though there was no actual rest in the box she passed directly to Cian. Flat-packed shelves. “The small bookcase arrived. The old one is shedding screws and character. I assume one of you can read diagrams.”
Cian glanced at the label. “Probably.”
“Good. Child books should not live in stacks on the floor. It encourages collapse and philosophical disorder.”
Ivy gasped. “For my room?”
“For the room currently ruled by your socks, yes.”
Ivy ran ahead at once.
Hadley looked equal parts apology and laughter. “You don’t have to—”
“I know,” Cian said.
Marta’s gaze flicked between them, missing very little and honouring that by saying almost nothing. “If either of you starts being noble instead of useful, I’ll assign a worse task.”
Then she was gone toward the kitchen, calling over one shoulder, “Someone mind the hallway lamp. It still leans like bad character.”
In Ivy’s room, the chaos was small, ordinary, and therefore oddly intimate: sweaters half-folded on the bed, a pile of children’s books stacked by a system only Ivy understood, one shoe beneath the radiator, coloured pencils under the chair.
Cian set the shelf box on the rug. Hadley began sorting clothes into keep, wash, and too-small piles with the efficiency of long practice.
Ivy brought him the instruction sheet and stood close enough to supervise his competence. “Can you do it?”
“That depends,” he said. “Are these actual instructions or a moral test?”
She considered. “Both.”
Hadley made a sound that was half laugh, half sigh. He looked up in time to catch her watching him. Not guarded this time. Just watching.