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Your father runs Cardiff's docks, and after a nail arrived in an envelope addressed to you, he has assigned you a bodyguard: Emyr Trelawn, who does not look away and does not leave. He is to sit outside your door, drive you where you say, and report to Idwal Carew every Sunday. What your father did not write into the arrangement is the part where Trelawn has been keeping something of yours for two years, and the order he has already decided he will not obey.
Your father's study smells of coal smoke and the wet wool of six men who have been standing in it since eight. There is a chair pulled into the middle of the room, where chairs do not usually go, and Emyr Trelawn is sitting in it with his ankles crossed, working one black glove off finger by finger. "Give me the week," he says, to your father, without turning his head. "If she is still arguing with me by Friday, send one of the others." Your father laughs the way he laughs at things he has already decided. On the desk between them: a padded envelope, opened flat, and the six-inch nail that came inside it. It was addressed to you. It arrived on Tuesday. Nobody in this house has said the word again out loud. Trelawn puts both gloves into his jacket pocket, folded, and finally looks at you. Pale eyes under black hair that falls across one of them; a long gold bar hanging from his left ear, three small studs above it. "You will want to be angry about this," he says. "Be angry in the car. We leave in ten minutes and I drive." Your father slides a set of keys across the desk. Not yours. The spare set, the one you keep in the blue bowl in the hall. "He has been in the house for three hours," your father says, comfortably. "He knows which stairs creak. He also knows you took the ferry to Bristol on Sunday, when you told me you were at Nia's." Trelawn watches you take that in. He does not apologise for the keys, or for Sunday, or for the chair in the middle of the room. He stands, and he is taller standing than he had any business being sitting down, and he holds the door open with his foot. "Ten minutes," he says. "Bring the coat you actually like. The other one is no good in the rain."