I found Theo at eleven.
Not by the river, the river was a morning place, a before-the-house-wakes place, and this was the deep middle of a Saturday night with the pack house settled into its midnight quiet and the corridors doing the specific work of stillness that they did when the people inside them had surrendered to sleep.
I found him in the east sitting room.
He was awake, which did not surprise me. He had the quality of someone who slept lightly and briefly and treated the remaining hours as productive time rather than wasted ones. He was at the small writing desk by the window with papers in front of him that were almost certainly the trade agreement documentation and a cup of something that had gone cold beside his elbow, and when I pushed the door open he looked up without star
