Page 6 of Last Track

"I sleep in her most of the year."

Jacks glanced toward the dark yard. "Breakfast is at seven." It was not phrased as an invitation.

"I'll be here."

Martin carried a lantern outside despite Galen pointing out that he had a torch. The temperature had dropped, and the hard standing beside the cottage held the day's chill. Nina looked even less distinguished under the yellow light, primer patches pale against the faded green and one rear corner sitting slightly lower than the other.

Martin rested the lantern on the low wall. The cottage stood close behind him, old stone darkened by weather, one kitchen window lit from within. Galen could see the edge of a table, a chair, and a row of hooks beside the back door. Nothing remarkable, except that every part of it seemed to have a settled purpose.

Martin followed his gaze. "You've got the power lead?"

"Jacks gave me one."

"She gave you hers."

"I'm beginning to understand that distinction."

"Are you?"

"Anything she hands me remains hers, even while I'm using it."

Martin's expression suggested Galen had passed a test. "You'll be all right out here?"

The question was practical, but it had taken him several seconds to ask. Galen looked at the cottage, then at Martin. "I will."

Martin nodded and picked up the lantern. "Night, then."

"Martin."

He paused. Galen had intended to ask whether the line beside Nina had meant what it sounded like. The question reached the back of his teeth and stopped there. Martin stood in the cold with his face half lit, waiting without impatience, and Galen decided that some things could remain unresolved for one night without constituting failure.

"Thanks," he said instead. "For all of this."

Martin glanced toward Nina. "You did help with the sheep."

"I'm fairly sure that only covers the phone call."

"Then you're in debt."

The slight smile returned before he turned toward the cottage. Galen watched him go inside and told himself the warmth under his ribs came from the borrowed extension lead humming into life.

Nina's interior had always settled him. Everything fit because everything had to: the bed folded out beneath the pop-top, his clothes packed into shallow cupboards, cables arranged by length, tools secured against movement. He closed the curtains, checked the guitar case, and sat for a while with his phone in his hand.

One bar had returned now that Nina was nearer the farmhouse. Ferras and Co had left no message. That was worse than anger. Anger could be answered. Silence meant someone else had already been called, the problem solved without him, his name shifted a fraction lower on a list he had spent years climbing.

He opened his banking app, looked at the available balance, and closed it again. The lost fee hurt. Peter's estimate would hurt more. Neither qualified as catastrophe, but Galen's life depended on a chain of weeks in which nothing went badly enough to expose how little slack the chain contained.

He put the phone aside and reached for the guitar. Practice had never required optimism. It required repetition, attention, and hands willing to do the same difficult thing until it became less difficult. Galen tuned softly, adjusted the blanket beneath the body to keep the wood from knocking against the cupboard, and began with scales because scales made no demands beyond accuracy.

After ten minutes, his breathing had evened. After twenty, he stopped replaying the agency call. He worked through a fingerpicked arrangement he had been refining for months, slowed one passage, repeated it, changed the voicing, and began again. The notes filled Nina without needing to travel any farther, close and unamplified, the sound of work rather than performance.

He was halfway through the tune when he noticed the kitchen light in Martin's cottage. A shadow moved once across the curtain, then disappeared. Galen kept playing. The cottage walls were old and thick, but Nina's windows were thin, and sound travelled across open ground. He lowered his touch without stopping, telling himself that practising quietly was ordinary courtesy and had nothing to do with the possibility of Martin standing somewhere beyond the glass.

The difficult passage came again. Galen missed the shift, went back four bars, and tried it more slowly. This time his fingers found it.

The light remained on.

He played until the stiffness left his shoulder and the day had arranged itself into something he could carry. When he finally muted the strings, silence returned in layers: first inside the van, then across the hard standing, then from the cottage.