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Galen laughed softly, the sound warm against Martin's face, then stepped back far enough for Martin to inspect the hinge. Number forty-seven watched them from the other side with the blank satisfaction of an animal whose interruption had achieved its purpose.

"She needs a name now," Galen said.

"She needs better manners."

"Jacqueline."

Martin stared at him.

"What? Strong personality. Difficult tea."

"You're naming Jacks's sheep after Jacks?"

"I'm proposing it."

"You can propose it to her."

Galen considered the field, the farmhouse beyond it, and the probable consequences. "Perhaps forty-seven has suffered enough."

Martin laughed before he could stop himself. They returned to the hinge. Galen picked up the spanner and moved beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched whenever either man reached for the bolt. Martin could have asked him to shift.

He did not.

5

GALEN

Four days into sleeping under Jacks and Hazel's roof, Galen had learned the exact creak that meant someone was coming down for tea at midnight, which shelf in the spare room held spare blankets, and that Hazel's bookshelves ran heavily to French novels with English translations shelved directly beside them, as though she'd been quietly building an argument for decades. He had learned Martin's schedule too, though nobody had taught it to him on purpose: the yard by six, the kitchen by seven, a particular quiet after supper when Martin read at the table rather than retreating to the cottage, as if some nights the extra ten minutes were worth staying for.

Nina sat somewhere in Peter's workshop wearing a tarp and, presumably, an opinion about being taken apart by strangers. Galen missed her like a difficult friend, but he had stopped waking in the night to check whether she'd been towed back without his knowing. The farmhouse had a spare room with a proper bed and a door that locked, and Galen had started, cautiously, to enjoy Martin's company on days when neither of them touched at all: passing a spanner, arguing about a sheep's temperament, sharing the specific satisfaction of a fence line finally standing square. It was a stranger kind of intimacy than the one he was used to, built from repetition rather than performance, and he had not yet decided whether it frightened him more or less than the other kind.

It was Seamus who ended that particular peace.

He found Galen at the feed store on a Thursday, introduced himself with a handshake dry enough to suggest he shook a great many hands and trusted very few of them, and asked, without preamble, whether Galen played anything worth hearing.

"Depends who's asking."

"I run the Wrenwood Arms. My Friday man's got his mother's birthday." Seamus named a fee that was fair without being generous, professional to professional. "Two sets. I'll feed you, and you can drink at cost, which is the only real perk of the job."

Galen shook on it before he'd fully decided, which told him something about how badly he'd missed being paid to play rather than paid to carry timber.

Friday evening, a broad-shouldered man called Heath found him wrestling a speaker cable behind the bar and took one look at the tangle before asking, "Facing the room, or the bar?" Galen said the room, and Heath nodded once and rerouted the lead without further comment, the economy of someone who'd clearly done this for other musicians before and had no patience for the ones who hadn't known to ask.

Maureen arrived before either of them finished setting up and claimed the good chair by the fire as though it had been reserved in her name since the pub was built. She watched Galen tune with the frank, unhurried attention of a woman who had already decided what she thought of him and was simply confirming it at her leisure, glass in hand.

Martin arrived halfway through the first pint anyone else had ordered, took up a position against the far wall, and did not move from it again for the rest of the evening.

"You'll wear a groove in the floor standing there," Maureen said, not quietly.

"I'm listening to the music."

"Of course you are."

Galen caught the exchange and kept his face carefully arranged around his guitar.

The room settled around him the moment he stopped trying to win it and simply gave it something true. He opened with what people wanted, easy and familiar, the kind of set built to sit under conversation rather than interrupt it: a few standards, something with a chorus the room could half-remember, nothing that asked anyone to stop talking to their neighbour. He read the temperature of the crowd the way he'd learned to read any room in a decade of doing this for money, adjusting a tempo here, dropping a key there, keeping the evening comfortable rather than remarkable. It was good, competent work, and he was glad to be doing it again.

Near the end of the second set, he let the room go quiet around him without asking it to.