The first lie Maeve Devlin ever told Rowan of Brighthelm was that she had only agreed to the tour because the palace had asked nicely.
It was a ridiculous lie, for several reasons. The palace did not ask nicely. It issued invitations in cream envelopes thick enough to stop a small draught, with embossing that looked as if it had been pressed by a man who believed democracy was a passing fever. The palace requested, advised, proposed, and, on one memorable occasion, “hoped the matter might be accommodated with all reasonable enthusiasm,” which was courtier for Do it before lunch or we’ll start phoning your aunties.
Also, Maeve had not agreed because of the palace.
She had agreed because Rowan had stood in her aunt Máiréad’s Derry kitchen three weeks earlier, wearing a navy coat too formal for the linoleum and holding a mug of tea as if it were evidence, and said, very quietly, “I will not let them turn you into an accessory.”
Máiréad, who had been buttering toast with the menace of a woman preparing legal documents, had snorted. “Accessory? She’s a whole felony when she’s annoyed.”
Maeve had looked at Rowan over the steam. He had not smiled properly, but something at the corner of his mouth had remembered how. He was older than the boy she had first loved and younger than the public pretended he was. Twenty-three, nearly twenty-four, with the posture of a man trained to stand still while history hung medals on him, and the eyes of someone who had spent years learning that leaving a room could look like duty if your tailoring was good enough.
She knew that trick.
She had used her own version of it. Law school. Courtrooms. Podcast studios. Clean jackets. Exact lipstick. Jokes delivered so crisply nobody could hear the bruise underneath. Maeve Devlin had built a life out of making truth sound tidy. It was only in kitchens, with kettles clicking and someone’s washing machine thudding through the wall, that her carefulness loosened at the seams.
The tour had been Crispin Vale’s idea, which meant it arrived smelling faintly of varnish and calculation. A goodwill tour through Brighthelm’s coastal towns, with charity visits, youth-law panels, community kitchens, school privacy launches, and one highly controlled garden concert. Maeve would appear beside Rowan as a “longstanding family friend and civic advocate.” Rowan would be “visibly relaxed.” The press would have their photographs. The palace would have its soft-power miracle. The public would have a romance to chew on until the next budget row.
Fake for the craic, Máiréad had called it, reading the briefing with her glasses low on her nose. “Which is a phrase that should never be written by any man called Crispin unless he’s apologising for his own christening.”
Rowan had looked at Maeve then. Not at the papers. Not at Máiréad. At Maeve.
“And if it stops being fake?” he had asked.
Maeve had laughed because it was safer than answering. “Jesus, Your Royal Highness. We haven’t even agreed on shoe protocol and you’re already making it weird.”
“That was not an answer.”
“No, but it had charm.”
“It had evasion.”
“Aye. Charm’s harder to spell.”
Máiréad had slapped the butter knife down. “Both of you are giving me indigestion and I’ve not even eaten.”
That had been three weeks ago. Before the final security routes. Before the press pens were measured. Before a school in North Harbour sent RJ’s class a privacy packet with cartoon cameras crossed out in cheerful red. Before Rowan asked, with careful casualness, whether Maeve still drew maps when she was nervous. Before she found herself saying no, absolutely not, then went home and moved RJ’s latest drawing from the fridge into a drawer like a woman hiding a lit match.
Now the tour began in Derry, because Crispin was clever in the way foxes were clever around henhouses. Derry gave the whole machine warmth. Derry gave Rowan Irish roots through Nuala Kincaid, his grandmother with the sharp tongue and sharper memory. Derry gave Maeve a moral backdrop: terraces, rain-dark stone, school gates, aunties who could identify a bad man by how he queued for bread. Put a prince in a Derry kitchen and the footage looked humble. Put Maeve beside him and the captions wrote themselves.
Childhood friends reunite for national service.
A modern royal romance?
Brighthelm’s favourite spare prince finds his smile again.
Maeve hated that last one most. As if Rowan’s smile were a missing cardigan the public had misplaced and now expected her to return, freshly laundered.
The morning of the first event, Máiréad’s kitchen had become command central. There were shoes under chairs, press notes beside the biscuit tin, and three separate people arguing about whether lemon possets counted as breakfast if eaten standing up. RJ sat at the table in his school jumper, bent over a map of Brighthelm he had drawn himself. Not copied. Designed. He had labelled the palace as BIG HOUSE WITH TOO MANY WINDOWS and the press pen as CAMERA FARM. The harbour had waves like rows of serious eyebrows.
Maeve watched him shade the school slow-zone in green pencil. His hair, too much like Rowan’s in the morning light, stuck up at the crown. He had her concentration and Rowan’s stillness. He had Rowan’s way of going quiet when adults lied kindly near him.
“Your bus is in fifteen minutes,” she said.
“Seventeen,” RJ said, without looking up.
“A scholar and a pedant. I’m blessed.”
“You said accuracy matters.”
“I said that about court evidence, not breakfast tyranny.”
He added a tiny dotted line behind a row of houses. “This is the private route for children if journalists come near the school.”
Máiréad, at the cooker, went very still. Only for a second. Long enough that Maeve felt it in her own ribs.
“We have actual adults for that,” Maeve said lightly. “With radios and unfortunate shoes.”
RJ’s pencil paused. “Adults miss things when they’re trying to look normal.”
There it was. Six words, calm as milk, sharp enough to cut through every briefing note in the room.
Maeve crossed to him and brushed a crumb from his sleeve. “Then we’ll make sure they don’t have to look normal. They can just do their jobs.”
“Will Prince Rowan be there?”
The kitchen did not stop. Not visibly. The kettle still grumbled. A taxi sighed outside. Máiréad scraped toast from the grill. But underneath, something held its breath.
“At the community kitchen today,” Maeve said. “Not at your school.”
RJ nodded, thoughtful. He drew a small square beside the harbour. “He should use this door. It’s less obvious.”
Maeve looked at the square. It was the side entrance to St Brigid’s Hall, where the first event would be held. He had remembered it from one photograph in a public brochure. He remembered everything that mattered and several things Maeve wished he did not have to.
“I’ll pass that along,” she said.
“Don’t say I said.”
“I won’t.”
He looked up then. His eyes were not quite Rowan’s. That was the mercy and the cruelty of it. They were his own, grey-green and watchful, already learning the adult art of asking one question while needing the answer to another.
“Does he like maps?”
Maeve’s throat tightened. She could have lied. She had lied before, gently, around the edges. Not cruelly. Never for sport. But the lie had still grown rooms inside their life. Rooms where Rowan’s name sat unsaid. Rooms where RJ’s questions wandered at night. Rooms Maeve had locked because she thought locked doors were safer than broken glass.
“He does,” she said.
RJ nodded again, as if filing that somewhere private. “Good.”
Máiréad turned with two slices of toast on a plate and the expression of a woman who would fight God with a fish slice if required. “Eat that before your mother starts confessing to furniture.”
“I do not confess to furniture,” Maeve said.
“You apologised to the tumble dryer last Tuesday.”
“It was making a noise.”
“It’s from 2008. So am I, emotionally, but nobody’s writing poems.”
RJ smiled into his toast. A small thing. A real one. Maeve stored it, because mothers were magpies of evidence: smiles, socks, drawings, temperatures, the exact weight of a child leaning against you when the world had been too loud.
By nine, RJ was on the bus, Máiréad was pretending not to watch from behind the lace curtain, and Maeve stood in the narrow hall fastening the zip of her green dress. The dress was not royal. That had been the point. It had sleeves, pockets, and enough structure to stop photographers inventing feelings from fabric. Crispin’s assistant had suggested ivory. Maeve had said absolutely not. Ivory made women look like offerings. Green made her look like herself, or close enough to survive the morning.
The zip caught halfway.
“Typical,” she muttered.
A knock came at the back door. Two short taps, one pause, one final tap. Nuala Kincaid’s old signal. Rowan had learned it as a child, apparently, during summers when he was smuggled into Derry for cousins, crisps, and ordinary rain.
Máiréad appeared in the hall, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “If that’s a courtier, I’m telling him we’ve died.”
“It’s Rowan.”
“Worse. A courtier with cheekbones.”
Maeve gave her a look.
“What? I’m old, not blind.”
Rowan came in through the back like a man entering a chapel he had once helped paint. No entourage. No photographer. Just Finn O’Kane outside by the gate, pretending not to be security while looking exactly like security. Rowan wore a dark suit and no tie yet, the top button open, his formal coat hooked over one arm. His hair was damp from the walk. There was a paper bag in his other hand.
“Morning,” he said.
Máiréad took the bag. “If this is pastries, you may live.”
“Treacle farls from Nuala.”
“You may thrive.”
He looked at Maeve. For one ungenerous second she wished he had arrived looking princely and ridiculous, something easy to mock. Instead he looked tired, careful, and kind in a way that made the air shift. His gaze went to the stuck zip at her side, then back to her face. He did not move closer without permission. That, somehow, was worse.
“Do you need a hand?” he asked.
Maeve inhaled. “With the zip or the constitutional theatre?”
“The zip first. I’m not dressed for revolution before ten.”
Máiréad made a noise into the pastry bag. “Coward.”
Maeve turned her back to him because she was apparently a woman of courage and poor survival instincts. The hallway mirror caught a sliver of them: her chin lifted, his hand raised, neither of them touching yet.
“It caught the lining,” she said.
“I see it.”
His fingers brushed the fabric, not skin. Still, her body remembered before her mind gave permission. Years collapsed in the small space between his knuckle and her spine: a bench above water, his guitar across his knees, her hand inside his coat pocket because she had forgotten gloves and he had pretended not to notice she was trembling.
“Tell me if I pull too hard,” he said.
“You always did have a gift for making domestic tasks sound like military operations.”
“I was trained by people who labelled teaspoons.”
“Aye, and look at you now. Loose in society.”
The zip slid up cleanly. He stepped back at once. Not coldly. Carefully. The distinction mattered too much.
“There,” he said.
Maeve faced him. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Máiréad, who had the mercy of a tax audit, said, “Grand. Now that the sexual tension has fixed the dress, can someone explain why the palace sent a schedule with eleven minutes for tea? Eleven. That’s not hospitality. That’s a hostage note.”
Rowan coughed. Maeve laughed despite herself, and the laugh saved her from saying something dangerous, like I missed you or RJ asked if you liked maps or I do not know how much longer I can keep our son outside your life without damaging all three of us.
Instead she picked up her coat. “We should go.”
At St Brigid’s Hall, the cameras were already waiting. They huddled behind barriers in the grey morning, black lenses bright with hunger. The palace had done its best: clear distance, no school access, local press priority, no questions shouted at children, no live geotags. Maeve had insisted on every line. Crispin had agreed with a smile that made her want to check her pockets.
He stood near the entrance now, immaculate in a charcoal suit, his hair so smooth it seemed personally opposed to weather.
“Maeve,” he said, taking both her hands before she could prevent it. “You look perfect.”
“Then something’s gone wrong.”
His smile held. “Always delightful.”
“Usually accurate.”
Rowan moved beside her. Not between them. Beside. A tiny choice, almost invisible. Maeve noticed anyway.
“Crispin,” Rowan said.
“Sir.” Crispin bowed his head. “The rota are in position. We’ll do the greeting line, kitchen walk-through, youth advocates, then the service pledge photograph. If you could both pause at the mural—”
“No children in the mural shot,” Maeve said.
Crispin’s eyes flicked. “The children’s art is the point of the—”
“The art can be photographed without names, faces, uniforms, or live school identifiers.”
“That may reduce emotional impact.”
“It will increase child safety.”
A small silence. Behind Crispin, one camera clicked, though nothing had happened. Cameras were like gulls: convinced every scrap belonged to them.
Rowan said, “Maeve’s protocol stands.”
Crispin inclined his head. “Of course.”
It sounded polite. It landed like a note entered in a ledger.
Inside, St Brigid’s smelled of tea steam, floor polish, damp coats, and the great communal optimism of women who had been feeding people long before anyone put a logo on kindness. Volunteers moved between tables stacked with bread, soup pots, thermal flasks, fruit crates, donated school shoes, and tins of biscuits that looked as though they had seen several governments rise and fall.
Maeve was greeted by name before Rowan was greeted by title, which pleased her more than it should have. Mrs Donnelly from Bishop Street grabbed her elbow and said, “You’re too thin, but we’ll discuss that after the monarchy.” Shane Doyle from the youth radio project showed Rowan the recording corner and immediately asked whether palace acoustics were as bad as they looked on television. Rowan, after one startled blink, gave a serious answer about marble and echo. By ten, he had taken off his jacket and was carrying crates like a man who understood usefulness was not a photo opportunity but a thing done with your back.
Maeve watched him from the tea station.
That was her mistake.
Crispin appeared at her shoulder. “He plays very well in this setting.”
“He’s not a fiddle.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. That’s the problem.”
Crispin picked up a mug and set it down again without drinking. “The public need reassurance. After the last two years, Brighthelm needs warmth. Continuity. Something human.”
“Human is not the same as available.”
“No one is asking you to surrender privacy.”
Maeve looked at him then. “Crispin, you people ask for privacy the way toddlers ask for biscuits. Sweetly, constantly, and with no intention of stopping at one.”
His smile thinned. “You are very good on camera.”
“I’m better off it.”
“Yes,” he said. “But off camera, you don’t help us.”
There it was. The old machine, polished clean enough to see your face in it. Help us. Smile here. Stand there. Turn pain into proof that the institution still had a pulse. Maeve had spent years learning the difference between service and extraction. Service asked what the vulnerable needed. Extraction asked what the powerful could use.
Across the room, Rowan crouched to listen to an elderly veteran explain the hall’s broken heating system. He had one hand braced on his knee, head inclined, wholly present. No flourish. No princely glow. Just a man listening properly while the cameras searched for the angle.
Maeve looked away before the sight could undo her.
At half eleven, a volunteer brought out the palace tea service for the official photograph. Maeve nearly laughed. Only Brighthelm could send silver teapots to a hall with a leaking roof and call it outreach. The set was beautiful, she’d give them that: old silver, white cups, a small clover motif on the rim. The kind of object designed to imply continuity. The kind of object women had polished for centuries while men gave speeches about tradition.
Rowan caught her expression. “Say it.”
“I’m behaving.”
“That was not a denial.”
“It’s a lovely tea service.”
“You sound as if you’re identifying a body.”
“It died of symbolism.”
His smile arrived then, quick and helpless, and the nearest camera caught it. Maeve heard the shutter. Rowan heard it too. The smile did not vanish, but it became guarded. That hurt worse.
The official shot was meant to be simple: Rowan pouring tea, Maeve passing cups to volunteers, a mural blurred tastefully behind them, no children visible. For three minutes, it worked. Maeve spoke with Mrs Donnelly about meal delivery routes. Rowan asked Shane about youth podcast funding. The cameras clicked. Crispin hovered. Everyone performed humanity with varying degrees of success.
Then a reporter called, “Maeve, is the prince as charming privately as he looks publicly?”
Finn stepped forward. Crispin froze. Rowan’s hand tightened on the teapot.
Maeve turned, cup in hand, and smiled her barrister smile. The one that made unprepared men check their paperwork.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Privately, he’s usually being told what to do by women from Derry.”
The hall laughed. Even Rowan. The reporter flushed, denied a headline and handed a joke instead.
“Nicely done,” Rowan murmured when she turned back.
“I charge extra for monarchy rescue.”
“I’ll add it to the civil list.”
“You’re not funny enough to be expensive.”
“No,” he said, softly enough that only she heard. “But I’m trying to be useful.”
The words landed in her like a key in an old lock.
Useful. Not adored. Not forgiven. Not restored by romance into the shining boy public memory preferred. Useful. He had learned her language while she was busy pretending she no longer listened for his.
After lunch, the tour moved to the youth legal clinic. Maeve spoke on privacy rights with Ms Aoibh McGuckin, a teacher whose bun could have survived a natural disaster. Rowan sat in the front row and took notes, which was either deeply respectful or an act of emotional terrorism. The young advocates asked better questions than half the parliament committees Maeve had endured. Could a child refuse a royal photograph if their parents agreed? Who owned a school event image once a newspaper scraped it? Why did adults call it tradition when they meant habit?
Maeve answered plainly. “Consent is not less real because a child gives it. It is more fragile, which means adults have more responsibility, not less.”
A girl in the second row asked, “What if the child’s famous before they can decide?”
Maeve felt Rowan’s attention, still as winter.
“Then the adults around that child need to build a fence before they build a stage,” she said. “And if they failed to do that at the start, they can still start now.”
Her phone buzzed in her pocket at two minutes past two. She ignored it. It buzzed again. Then once more, which meant Máiréad or the school. Maeve stepped back as Aoibh took the next question and checked the screen.
MÁIRÉAD: He’s fine. Bus delay only. Don’t go pale in front of the gentry.
A second message followed.
MÁIRÉAD: RJ says tell Prince Rowan his side door worked. No cameras there.
Maeve stared at the words until they blurred.
No crisis. No exposure. No disaster. Just her son, solving adult problems from a school bus, and wanting Rowan to know.
Her chest hurt with the ordinary cruelty of it. RJ did not want a crown. He wanted to be right about a door. He wanted a man he did not yet know was his father to approve of the map he had drawn.
Maeve locked the phone. Unlocked it. Read the message again.
Then Rowan was beside her, not touching. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her face. “Maeve.”
She hated and loved the way he said her name when he knew she was lying. No accusation. No courtly pressure. Just a door left open.
“It’s RJ,” she said. “He’s fine. Bus delay.”
Rowan’s expression changed at the name. Not dramatically. Rowan did not do dramatic unless given a uniform and a balcony. But something in him leaned toward it. Toward the child. Toward the shape of a truth he had walked around for too long without knowing its doorway.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad he’s safe.”
“He said your side door worked.”
“My side door?”
Maeve swallowed. “He drew a safer route for today. He noticed the hall entrance from a public photo.”
Rowan was silent for a long second. Around them, applause rose for Aoibh’s answer. Cameras shifted. Crispin glanced over. The world kept performing itself.
“He drew it?” Rowan asked.
“Aye.”
“He likes maps?”
Maeve’s hand closed around the phone. “He loves them.”
Rowan looked down, then away, toward the high windows of the hall. His jaw worked once. When he spoke, his voice had lost its public polish. “I did too.”
“I know.”
That was the mistake. Not the words. The softness. The I know that carried years inside it. Rowan heard all of them. She saw him hear them.
His eyes returned to hers. “Maeve.”
Before he could ask the question, Crispin arrived with a tablet and a smile sharpened for interruption. “We need you both for the walkabout. Excellent response online, by the way. The side-door clip is already doing beautifully.”
Maeve went cold. “What side-door clip?”
Crispin blinked. “A harmless arrival shot. Long lens, no breach. It shows the prince avoiding the main press pack. Very humble, very grounded.”
Rowan’s face shut down. “Who authorised that angle?”
“It was outside the restricted zone.”
“That was not my question.”
Maeve took the tablet. The clip was six seconds. Rowan entering by the side door, rain in his hair, one volunteer holding the door with a laugh. Sweet. Human. Harmless, unless you knew a child had drawn that route to keep cameras away. Unless you knew the machine had turned even the safe door into content.
Her fingers went numb.
“Delete it,” she said.
Crispin’s smile slipped. “Maeve, it has already been shared by the palace account.”
“Then unshare it.”
“That would create speculation.”
“Good,” Rowan said.
Crispin looked at him. “Sir?”
“Let them speculate that we noticed a mistake and corrected it.”
“With respect, that undermines the momentum—”
“With respect,” Rowan said, and the old ducal steel entered his voice, “if our momentum requires using a private safety route for charm, then our momentum deserves to trip and break its neck.”
Maeve nearly smiled, which was not appropriate, but nobody had ever accused grief of having manners.
Crispin bowed his head. “I’ll handle it.”
“No,” Maeve said. “I will.”
She opened her own account, typed before fear could dress itself as caution, and posted one line: Safety routes are not content. Children and communities deserve privacy even when public people are present. Thank you to St Brigid’s for modelling better standards than the grown-ups online.
She sent it.
The hall did not explode. Not immediately. The world rarely did the courtesy of matching one’s panic. Instead, a volunteer asked whether anyone wanted more tea, a photographer cursed softly at his dying battery, and Rowan looked at Maeve as if she had stepped out from behind every polite wall she had built.
“That will make things difficult,” he said.
“Aye.”
“For both of us.”
“Aye.”
He nodded once. “Then we’ll be difficult accurately.”
Something inside her nearly gave way. She had been alone with the truth for so long that companionship felt suspicious, like a chair that might collapse if trusted. Rowan did not reach for her. He did not make a speech. He took the tablet from Crispin, handed it back face-down, and stepped beside Maeve for the walkabout as if beside was a vow.
By evening, the tour had become a story. Not the one Crispin wanted. The palace deleted the clip after forty-two minutes and issued a clipped clarification. Maeve’s post went everywhere: praised, mocked, memed, misquoted, defended by teachers, attacked by commentators who believed privacy was elitist unless they wanted it themselves. Someone made a cartoon of Rowan tripping over “momentum,” which Máiréad printed and stuck on the fridge.
The last engagement ended at dusk in the hall garden, where sea wind cut between formal coats and the fairy lights trembled like they had second thoughts. Rowan gave a short speech about service without spectacle. Maeve stood two steps behind him, where protocol placed her, and listened as he did something dangerous. He meant it.
Not perfectly. Not enough to fix the machine in a day. But enough that the volunteers heard the difference. Enough that the teachers nodded. Enough that Crispin’s jaw tightened in the shadows.
Afterward, when the last camera had been packed away and the final cup stacked, Maeve found Rowan by the side door. The famous one now. The safe one now spoiled and reclaimed. He had his coat on but not buttoned, his hands in his pockets, his head tipped back against the brick.
“You should go,” she said.
“Probably.”
“Very royal answer.”
“I’m off duty enough to be unwise.”
“That sounds like something requiring supervision.”
He looked at her. “I’ll accept Derry oversight.”
She huffed a tired laugh. Then silence settled. Not empty. Full of all the words the day had pushed to the edges. The courtyard smelled of rain, old brick, and tea gone cold. Somewhere beyond the wall, a car door shut. Finn waited at a respectful distance, doing his best impression of a lamppost with threat assessment skills.
Maeve took RJ’s folded map from her bag. She had not meant to bring it. That was the lie she told herself for half a second before abandoning it as beneath both of them. The paper was soft from being opened and closed. Green pencil. Dotted line. Side door. Camera farm.
Rowan saw it and went completely still.
“RJ drew this,” she said.
His hands came out of his pockets, then stopped. “May I?”
She handed it to him.
He held the paper with absurd care, as if it were old vellum or a sleeping bird. His eyes moved over every label, every route, every small practical invention. Maeve watched his face and saw the moment admiration became pain.
“He’s very good,” Rowan said.
“He is.”
“Precise.”
“A menace in school projects.”
“Thoughtful.”
“Aye.”
He touched the pencilled square by the side entrance. “He saw the risk before we did.”
“Children often do. Adults are just louder about being surprised.”
Rowan folded the map back along its creases. His thumb lingered on the initials RJ in the corner. Not Rowan James written out. Just RJ. Two letters, ordinary as a lunchbox label, devastating as a birth certificate.
“Maeve,” he said.
This time no Crispin arrived. No volunteer called. No camera clicked. The world, for once, had the decency to shut up.
Maeve looked at the door, then the courtyard, then Rowan. “Not here.”
His face changed, but he did not push. “Where?”
“My aunt’s. After RJ’s asleep.”
A breath left him. He had not asked the question. She had not answered it. Still, the truth stood between them, small and alive, waiting to be picked up properly.
“Maeve,” he said again, and now his voice broke around the edge of her name.
She could not comfort him yet. Comfort was a promise, and she had learned to be careful with promises when a child’s life sat inside them.
“You’ll listen first,” she said. “All the way through. No rushing to fix it. No noble vanishing. No deciding what’s best while I’m still mid-sentence.”
He nodded. Once. Like a soldier receiving terms and a father, though he did not know it fully yet, accepting the first rule of a country he had no right to enter badly.
“I’ll listen,” he said.
“And after, we decide what protects RJ. Not the palace. Not your title. Not my pride. Him.”
“Him,” Rowan said.
The word changed the air. It was only one syllable. It carried no proof, no paperwork, no public statement. Still, Maeve felt it settle into the brick, the rain, the ruined choreography of the day. Him. Not scandal. Not heir. Not content. A boy with a green pencil who knew adults missed things when they tried too hard to look normal.
Maeve took the map back and tucked it into her bag. Her fingers were steadier than she expected. That frightened her too. Panic at least had the courtesy of announcing itself. Resolve arrived like tea placed silently beside you: ordinary, hot, impossible to ignore.
Rowan opened the side door for her. Not because cameras waited. Not because protocol required it. Because the hinge stuck and he had noticed.
Maeve stepped through.
Behind them, the hall lights clicked off one by one. Ahead, Derry waited with wet pavements, bus routes, aunties, toast crumbs, and a sleeping child who had drawn a door into the future without knowing who would have to walk through it.
For the first time in years, Maeve did not lock that door behind her.