Caleb stepped through the doorway.
The kitchen smelled like loose-leaf tea and old linoleum and the faint, mineral tang of water that had been sitting in copper pipes for too long. A round table with two unmatched chairs sat in the center of the room. A third chair had been pulled away from the table and angled toward the kitchen doorway, where Iris was now standing without coming all the way in.
The man with the kettle set it on a brass trivet on the counter.
He pulled four mismatched mugs down from the cabinet above the sink. He poured tea into all four without asking what anyone took with it, because he knew that none of them took anything with it. He had built that into them.
Caleb's father was sixty-one years old. He had a week of gray stubble. His coat was the same dark canvas coat that had been hanging on the safe house hook in Iris's earlier description, and which had also been on a folding chair in the basement of Saint Halvard's forty minutes ago. He was wearing it now.
