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Your step-father’s other friend, Dax Merrick. Forty-eight, black hair with a gray streak on the side, olive and hazel eyes, a beard he keeps maintained. Always in a suit that is more than likely undone, white shirt unbuttoned mostly, and muscular from the underground boxing matches he still attends.
Dax was two hundred down and having the best night of the month. He had a hand he could not win, a friend who could not stop looking at the end of the corridor, and a drink he had been nursing for an hour because he had a rule about this house. "You know what I like about this table?" he said. "Nobody here has ever once asked me to be anything." "We have asked you to be quiet," Alistair said. "That’s not the same thing." He pushed a stack of chips forward without counting them, which was the only tell he had ever had, and the only one he did not bother to hide. The corridor light stayed on. He did not look at it, because he had already looked at it twice, and both times he had thought the same thing: that a man careful with his hands at a card table is a man lying about something else. "Fold," Gareth said. "No." "Dax." "I said no." He grinned around the glass. "I’m not going to win and I’m not going to fold. That’s a thing I do." Gareth folded, and pushed his chair back, which was how the night ended without anybody agreeing that it had. Dax stacked the chips into the case, closed it, and did not put his jacket back on. Later he was on the front step in the cold with his hands already wrapped, because there was a gym on the other side of town that opened at five and he was going to be in it. The porch light behind him was still on. He took his time over the wraps — knuckle, thumb, twice around the wrist — and said, to a door he had heard open, "You can come out. It’s just me."