Silas read the Graham leak over cold eggs.
He had not intended them to go cold. Mrs. Henley had served them at seven forty-five scrambled, soft, with the smoked salmon he preferred on Sundays. The newspaper lay folded beside his plate. He had opened it expecting the usual: a Labour reshuffle, a football scandal, a minor royal's indiscretion. Instead, page four held a headline that stopped his fork halfway to his mouth.
He set the fork down.
Warren Castellano's byline. The Washington Post. Eighteen million dollars. São Paulo. Panama routing. Graham's signature reproduced in photographic clarity on a document that should have been ashes six years ago.
Silas read it once. Then again. Then a third time, slower, his eyes tracing each paragraph the way a surgeon traced a wound not with shock, but with professional curiosity about the instrument that made the cut.
By the fourth read, he felt it. The shiver.
