"Hello to you too. How have you been?"
Bartholomew brightened at once.
"Good, good," he said, adjusting his glasses with two fingers the way he always did when he wanted to appear more composed than he felt. "Cynthia is inside helping with the renovations. What do you think?"
Trafalgar let his gaze travel across the orphanage grounds.
The first time he came here, the place had felt old in the honest way poor places often did. A large three-story building wrapped in ivy, worn by time, with faded paint and the sort of warmth great houses could never buy no matter how much gold they stacked into stone. Back then, the roof had needed work, the halls had carried the quiet fatigue of a place surviving one season at a time, and yet the children's laughter had already made it feel fuller than most mansions.
Now the difference was easy to see.
