Her head turns sharply at that. “Your mother?”
“She’ll feed you, she’ll ignore your excuses, and she won’t report every five minutes unless I ask.”
“I don’t need nursing.”
“I’m not arguing about it.”
The men in the room go still in that way trained men do when they realize something private just crossed through the middle of business. Riley notices it too, and she straightens.
“I can manage myself,” she says quietly.
“I know you can,” I answer. “Do me the favor anyway.”
She studies my face for a moment, and whatever she came in here to say stays behind her teeth.
“Fine,” she says. “Tonight.”
“Tonight.”
She turns and leaves, and I watch until she clears the corridor, then I look at Conall. “If she tries to leave the estate again, someone tells me first.”
Conall gives a short nod. “Understood.”
“And call my mother.”
The harbor master arrives on video first, wind noise cutting in and out around his voice, his office window behind him showing a strip of gray water and cranes.
“We’ve got irregular movement near the east break,” he says. “No scheduled tugs, no declared tow, but there’s a service boat running dark and cutting wide around camera cones.”
“Whose boat?”
“Painted over. Registration panel covered.”
“Show me.”
He angles the camera to a monitor feed, grainy and distant, and I watch a low vessel drift past a marker where nothing commercial should be drifting at this hour. Too slow for transit, too careful for fishing.
“Time stamp?”
He reads it off.
“Again.”
He rewinds, and this time I watch the wake pattern and the way the boat checks speed near the outer pilings. They’re mapping lines or placing men, and neither option interests me.
“Keep every feed rolling,” I tell him. “No alerts over open radio. You call me directly if it comes back inside the break.”
He nods. “Understood.”
When the call ends, the office fills with the sound of work again, printers spitting pages, phones vibrating, a chair scraping back. I pull on my jacket and head for the corridor.
Maeve is on her way in as I reach the stairs, my mother behind her with a covered dish balanced in both hands and a face that already says she has questions she will ask later and instructions she will give now.
“You rang,” my mother says.
“I need you at the estate for a few hours,” I reply. “Riley’s been sick.”
Maeve glances at me, then toward the upper hall. “How sick?”