Page 23 of 13 Nights

"Call me tonight. Actually call me. Not a text. Not a voice memo. Your voice, in my ear, telling me what's going on."

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

I hang up and walk back to the cottage. Tom is hiding something in those family records. Whatever it is connects to Severin, to the Veil, and to whatever happened to the people who got too close. My mother found part of it. She left before she found the rest. I don't intend to leave.

After lunch, the afternoon stretches long. I try to write the novel—the contracted one, the one about fictional Hessian soldiers whose stories I control—and manage two paragraphs before the blinking cursor starts to feel like a judgment. The real Hessian soldier has made the fictional ones sound bloodless. Every sentence I type sounds thin compared to a man who told me the taste of salt pork in a ship's hold with enough irritation to make me believe he'd chewed it.

I close the file. Open the Severin folder instead. Read through my notes. Add context from last night's conversation. Cross-reference his account of Fritz's betrayal against the timeline I've built from Diane's documents. The work is good. The work is solid. The work keeps my hands busy while the part of me that isn't a journalist watches the light change outside the kitchen window.

The shadows lengthen. The trees at the edge of the property darken from gold to copper to something closer to rust. I catch myself looking at the clock.

He manifests at dusk. That's what the pattern says. But patterns are observations, not guarantees, and the man who vanished from my kitchen this morning did so thirteen seconds later than he should have. If the rules are changing, I don't know which ones. I don't know if the Veil will give him back tonight, or if what happened between us on this table triggered something that rewrites the terms of his prison. I don't know if he'll choose to come here even if he can.

The bruises on my hips have darkened to a deep, tender purple. I press my thumb against one of them and feel the ache all the way to my spine. He was real enough to leave those. Real enough to hold me, to command me, to tell me the last thought he had before a cannonball ended his life. Real enough that His absence has changed the proportions of the kitchen. The room feels larger, colder, and wrong.

The porch light. I should turn it on. Leaving it on says something I'm not ready to say out loud, but every signal I've given this man has been deliberate, and stopping now would be a lie.

I turn it on.

Dusk settles over October 23, and Night 5 begins. I leave the porch light on and wait at the kitchen table with my laptop open and my notes spread across the surface. I scrubbed it down three times this morning. Once for the mess. Twice because I could still feel his hands on me every time I looked at it.

He arrives earlier than last night. I open the door before he knocks.

"You were thirteen seconds late."

He stops on the threshold.

"Good evening to you too."

"Computed sunrise was 7:16. The recording caught you disappearing at 7:16:13."

The humor leaves his face. "That has never happened."

"I assumed it hadn't." I step aside and let him in. "Show me what you know about the sunrise pull. Everything."

He crosses to the kitchen table and looks at my laptop, at the Sunrise Log already open on the screen. "You've been measuring."

"I've been documenting. There's a difference."

We work. For the first time, the investigation isn't an exchange of guarded information across a table. It's a partnership.

I open my laptop and he sits beside me, and his memory fills the gaps my documents can't reach. He knows the Hadley family across generations, names and roles I couldn't have found in any public record. He remembers the boundary changes across centuries.

At one point I show him a photocopied page from my mother's collection, and he traces an annotation in the margin with his finger. "This hand is Haas's," he says. "The left-hand slant. The same hand that signed my confiscation entry." I photograph the page and tag it.

He corrects assumptions I've built into my timeline, and I correct several of his about how modern archives catalog military records.

The banter is sharp. His humor is dry and cutting. When I tell him the Marburg archivist hasn't responded yet, he says, "German bureaucracy survived two world wars. It will certainly survive your impatience."

At midnight, I ask him to show me the boundary.

We walk through Sleepy Hollow in the dark, past the shuttered shops and the Halloween decorations that look less cheerful at this hour. The streets are empty. He walks beside me, and the farther we move from the cottage, the less stable his edges become. At first I blame the darkness. Then we pass beneath a streetlamp and the flicker remains. Distance, not light, is the variable.

The Pocantico River crossing is a stone bridge over dark water. Severin stops well short of the far bank.