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For five months, I’ve been trying to solve this. I’ve had access to Riddings’s whole system, every camera and every log file. I’ve had Ivor’s people, Arkady’s brokers and my own men. I’ve spent nights in that control room going through footage frame by frame.

She solved it in an afternoon, with a diary and a business card and the memory of a pot of soup.

“You did this,” I say.

She looks startled. “Did what?”

“All of it. Selin, the storm, the boat, the gate. You put it together.” I shake my head slowly. “I couldn’t. I had everything in front of me, and I couldn’t see it.”

Her face does something complicated. She looks away, at the fireplace.

“I just notice things,” she says. “That’s all. It’s not a skill.”

“Galana.”

“It isn’t. Arina runs things. Zhenya’s brilliant. Eva’s brave, she’s braver than she thinks, and Milana can walk into any room and make everybody love her. I’m the one who makes the soup.” She laughs, but there’s nothing funny in it. “I’m the least of us. I always have been. Everyone knows it.”

I put the laptop aside.

“Look at me.”

She doesn’t, at first. So I wait patiently until she does.

“Twelve men work the gate at your father’s house,” I tell her. “You know every one of their names. You know who doesn’t eat dairy and who’s lonely at Christmas. You know who takes lemon in their tea. You remember the night of a storm five months ago because of what was in the pot.” I reach over and take her cold hand. “That isn’t nothing. That’s the most dangerous skill in our whole world. Most men in my line of work would kill to have it.”

Her lips part.

“You notice,” I say. “Everybody else in that house was so busy being loud, they never noticed you. And all that time, you were watching. Remembering. Seeing the things everyone else walked straight past.”

She’s crying now, silently, the tears just running down her face. She doesn’t wipe them away.

“Nobody’s ever said that to me,” she whispers.

“I’ll say it every day.”

“Why?”

I’ve never said the next thing to anyone in my life. I didn’t think I had it in me.

“Because I’m falling in love with you,” I tell her. “I think I started in April, in a control room at three in the morning. And I haven’t stopped since.”

She stares at me. “April?”

I tell her about the cameras, the sandwiches, and the names in black marker. About watching her carry a tray across a dark lawn to men who didn’t even look at her.

When I’m finished, she’s quiet for a very long time.

Then she climbs into my lap, there on the floor, and puts her arms around my neck. She presses her wet face into my throat, and she holds on. I hold her back, as tight as I dare, with her father’s diary sliding onto the carpet beside us.

It’s after midnight when I check the system one last time.

I’ve still got admin access to the house from my laptop. I pull up the gate logs for August twenty-eighth, just to see. It’s what I expect. Nothing between three and six p.m. A neat little gap where a visitor should be.

Deleted. Very cleanly.

I’m about to close the laptop when the screen flickers.

A small notification in the corner. Admin session active: G. Orlik. Location: Gatehouse terminal.