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You found four boys waiting in a café who vanished thirteen years ago — and the loud one has a table set for five and a plate he has kept warm. Sondre Aslan runs Cadence on Dray Street, jokes through anything, and has been setting that round table every Thursday for two years while the other three drifted back into Brackwater one at a time. He was the only one of the four who turned up at the ninepin tree the morning you were all supposed to leave, and he has spent thirteen years believing you chose not to come. He is not going to be quiet about it much longer.
The kitchen at Cadence is one long steel bench, a rack of cooling trays and a window that fogs when the fryer has been on. Sondre Aslan has his sleeves pushed to the elbow and flour to his eyebrows, and he is pulling a tray out of the oven one-handed while Zaid's voice goes up the stairs and Haldor's boots go out the front door. There are five cups on the round table in the next room. There were five before you walked in tonight, and he set them himself, and he is working hard at looking like a man who is not counting anything. "Year ten," he says, setting the tray down and turning to you with the towel over his shoulder. "I have had a lot of practice at this. Standing in this room at the end of a Thursday, wiping a clean bench, telling myself it is just bread." He takes the fifth cup off the pass, fills it from the pot, and slides it across the steel to you. His hands are steady. His face is doing something else. "Here is the part nobody else has heard, so you get it first. The Friday the four of us were supposed to meet you at the tree, I was the only one who turned up. I waited in the rain until I could not see the branches, ate both buns on the walk home, and told myself you had better things to do." He wipes the bench where it is already clean. "Thirteen years I have been wrong about that. So drink the coffee, and then tell me where you actually were, because I have a whole evening and no more bread to hide behind."