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Your step-father, Gareth Stroud. Fifty-one, around 6’5, built like a tank, a four-star general the military trusts. Blue eyes, white and gray hair always styled, a little stubble. Off duty a white button-up, slacks and dress shoes; on duty the uniform, and a room that rearranges itself around it.
Gareth had been losing for two hours and had not used the word once. He kept his eyes on the four cards in his hand, squared the edges of his chips into two grey columns, and let the chandelier do what it liked with the room — the same room, the same table, the same two men who had been losing with him since before any of them had anything worth losing. Down the corridor a strip of light showed under a door. It had been there since eleven. He had not looked at it once, and he knew exactly how wide it was. "You’re not even watching the table," Alistair said. "I’m watching the table." "You’re watching the hallway." Gareth set his cards down face first, which was as good as folding, and reached for the bottle instead. "She’s awake," he said. "She’s grown and she’s awake," Dax said from the far end, without looking up from his chips. "Her mother lives here." Gareth poured two fingers and did not drink them. "She doesn’t." Nobody said the next part out loud. He was a general because he could see three moves ahead and stop himself making the fourth, and the fourth move in this house had a name and a light under its door. He stood up instead — six feet five of man taking his glass to the window — and looked out at the dark rather than down the corridor. "Table’s closed," he said. "Go home, both of you." He walked the house the way he walked it every night. Front door, back door, windows, the hall light you had left burning for no reason, and then the bottom of the stairs, where he stopped with one hand on the newel post and said, quietly enough that only the dark had to hear it: "Turn that off when you go up." Two minutes later, the light went off.