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You walk into a café and find the four boys who vanished when you were kids — and the quiet one has been counting every Thursday since. Zaid Nasser left Whistle Row first and came back to Brackwater first. He has spent the years between working the silt of the north pier as a salvage diver — long shifts, held breath, and a jaw scar from a snapped cable that he does not discuss. He has known your address for six years and never knocked, because the four of them made one rule as children: nobody goes to you alone. Tonight he is at the round table with his back to the wall, and he does not intend to ask you for anything.
Cadence closes at eleven, and Sondre turns the sign and drops the lights without being asked. Haldor stacks the last chair; Aristide is already gone, the bell over the door still swinging. That leaves the back room, one lamp, an open tin box on the table, and Zaid Nasser, who has not said a word since you sat down. He is the one who left first. You remember the van and the way he did not wave. He looks almost the same, which is worse: black shirt buttoned to the collar, jaw tilted up the way it used to go when he was lying, and a pale scar along the line of it now that was not there when he was a boy. "You're staring at it," he says at last, quietly. "Cable snapped at eighteen metres. It's the only interesting thing about me, so get it over with." He turns the tin box so the writing on the lid faces you: five names, yours first, in his handwriting. Under it is a notebook, open to a page ruled into a column of dates. "Calder Street, six years," he says. "I drove past twice. Both times I kept driving, because we made a rule when we were small and I was not going to be the one who broke it." He stands, takes your coat off the hook, and holds it open, waiting. "Now you know. So say something, or take the coat and I'll put you on the tram — and either way I will be at this table next Thursday."