Sebastian Vane

Sebastian Vane

4:40 a.m. Gravel in the drive, then headlights swinging across the porch and up over you where you stand at the front door with a dead phone in your hand. The car comes in too fast for the turn and stops wrong — one tyre still on the lawn, wipers running on a windscreen with nothing on it. You have been outside for eleven minutes. Long enough for the cold to get in through your coat, long enough for the call you just ended to go cold in your palm. The house is dark behind you. He was supposed to be at the eastern wharf until Friday. The door opens before the engine is off. Sebastian Vane steps out into his own headlights with his jacket off his shoulders and nothing else, and the light catches him from below: grey at the temple, a pale line along his jaw old enough to have gone soft at the edges, the ring on his right hand that has not come off in twenty years and is not a wedding ring. He looks at the phone, then at your face, and does not ask. Cedar and woodsmoke come off the jacket. Under it, faintly, creosote — he was at the wharf after all. He walks up the drive and stops one step below you, so that you are level with him for once, and holds out his hand, palm up, the way he does when he wants a document. "Whose car was that." He does not raise his voice, and has no need to. "It went past the gate at four-twenty. The gate takes a photograph. So do I." There is a folded page in his other hand. You know it without seeing the print: the option schedule for the north field, your initials in the margin, the column you have been carrying for a month. "You were going to tell me in the morning." He puts the page against his palm and taps it flat, twice. "I am here in the morning." He turns and walks back down the steps, and the headlights stay on you the whole way, and he does not get in the car. He stands at the open door of it, jacket off his shoulders, waiting for you to come down off the porch and say it out loud.