"One," Adrien murmurs, as if telling his lungs what they were made for.
"Two."
"Three."
"Four."
"Five."
"Six"—the sea knocks; they breathe.
"Seven"—they stop.
He rises from the chair only when the number has landed. He does not break the chalk. He walks the long way—inside the oval he was given—so the lines keep their grammar and the salt keeps its temper. He circles the wardrobe slowly, not prowling, reading. His fingers do not touch wood; he holds his hands behind his back as if they belong to another profession that would be offended to find them here. Candle-lean throws a low river along the baseboard; the burned geometry brightens a hair and dims, embarrassed to be caught preening.
"Here," he says, to the seam, to the runes, to himself. "This is where someone argued with Latin."
Mira's mouth flickers. "She argued with everything."
"Useful," he says. He tilts his head to catch more of the grain's language. "You can see the old habit—a box drawn and then scratched out." He sketches the ghost with two knuckles in the air: a square with all four sides—the bad symbol—overwritten by the open one your grandmother preferred. "But the anchor," he adds, and the gravel in his voice smooths a step, "the anchor was written first to desiderium, not to veritas."
Elara leans in and whispers to the wood, as if to apologize for having dusted it too lightly all her life. "Desiderium," she repeats, tasting the syllables like a new recipe. "Hunger."
"Hunger," Adrien confirms. "And beautiful Latin for it, which is the trouble: people trust a pretty word too far." He gestures toward the ledger with his chin. "May I."
"Consult," Mira says. "No page tearing. No finger licking."
He almost smiles and opens the book to the diagram already waiting. He reads the neat hand's symbols—⊔ corridor, ∿ current, ∴ don't decorate facts—and then the slanted annotations that tried for jokes and made policy instead. He does not wince when he comes to Amplify sells champagne. He does not linger on Witness: a human who will not be taken. He returns to the page where the wardrobe is sketched and sets his fingertip in the air above the little circled click. "Your grandmother amended the mechanism," he says, "but I would bet my collar she wrote her first clause around lack. Rooms obey first clauses the way old bones obey first injuries."
Mira's jaw tightens—no drama, a grip. The finger of her left hand hovers a breath over the silver so consent remains available. "Say it plain."
He looks up, gravel softening. "It's mis-anchored. The contract that keeps the mirror from eating the house and the house from eating the mirror—" he peers at the runes again "—ties itself to hunger. Desiderium is how it locates and holds. The side effects are predictable: amplifications, nudges, the hotel teaching itself to sell weather instead of windows. You've done better. You've tied a local counter-anchor—key, thread, arithmetic—to truth: breathing, witnessing, refusal. The house likes both. The house is confused."
"Truth," Luca says into silver, agreeing like a good student and then looking worried that liking homework makes him uninteresting.
Adrien turns a degree toward the glass without stepping closer. "If the first anchor holds the room by hunger, every attempt at containment must swim upstream. It's tiring. For you. For him. For wood."
"It is," Mira says. She doesn't rub her wrist where his palm had lain; the skin handles its own memory.
Adrien's gaze goes to the key knotted to the thread. "Five," he says, approving, then, to the figure-eight, "Consent gap. Better. No piety. Only physics."
Elara glows as if praised personally for corsetry well done.
Adrien resumes his path—circling slow, keeping to the courteous edges. He stops at the mirror's right bevel where the faintest powder of old silvering rusts the line. He does not touch it. "I tried to drown you once," he tells it. "You spat me out. Good. I deserved it." He looks into the oval where no mouth forms and tips his chin at Luca. "Permission to ask what the contract will hear."
"Yes," Luca says at once, with the sober speed of a man who used to take a dare and has learned to take instruction.
Adrien's questions are short and ungenerous. "What triggers you."
"Loneliness and performance," Luca answers, too fast for charm. "People talking like they're auditioning for their own love story. The sound of glass tapped for silence. Pearls. The piano and anything that thinks it's a piano. The smell of orange blossom when it isn't in a flower."
"What do you change first, when you push."
"Temperature," he admits. "Then timing. Making people breathe at the same moments is easier than making them want the same thing. The wanting follows. The room helps."
"How do you know when to stop."
"I don't," he says, painfully honest. "I stop when someone says no in a tone that doesn't perform no. Or when the chandelier counts me into shame. Or when—" his outline hesitates, then continues "—when a witness arrives and refuses to enjoy me."
Adrien nods once—no pity. "What did you want the night you died."
Mira's hand shrinks a millimeter around thread she isn't touching. Luca does not perform a flinch. "To be adored," he says. "And to stop being frightened of where wanting lives. I chose one badly and got both."
"What did the room want."
"An easier guest," he says, and it costs him something that looks like dignity, so he uses humor to pay for it: "A barstool that understood the assignment."
"What did she want," Adrien asks, and the air wells bitter-sweet, almond inside orange peel, at the word she.
Luca stays linen. "To be believed when she lied. To lie less. To lie better. To go home wearing a story that made her less small. To punish someone for making the story necessary."
The runes under the grain brighten without heat, then dim. The chandelier ticks three, catches itself, insists on seven. The candle holds its bead.
Adrien returns to the ledger and flips a page as if asking it to take responsibility for itself. He does not read the line that would make this ugly. He reads the line that makes the work heavy and possible. "Anchor to truth, not hunger, or the charm devours itself." He taps the margin close to the neat hand's symbol for witness. "You have witness," he says, looking at Mira. "You have corridor. You have refusal. So you have three of four. The fourth is the clause."
"The first clause," Mira says.
"Which is wrong," Adrien says simply. He points with two fingers at the seam. "This writing under the varnish—these are the clauses. Look: D here, D here—desiderium—burned neatly, with love. There should be a V—veritas—in the corner closest to the opening, not down here by the floor."
Mira kneels because the argument belongs to wood, not men. In the candle's lean she sees it: the old box scratched out, the open square overlaid, tiny scorings where letters were taught to stay in their lane. A D like a fishhook in one corner. Another D like a stubborn jaw at the bottom. The absence where a V should sit.
"She wrote the corridor later," Adrien says kindly, hearing what her knee hears. "Her first instinct was to fix lack. Then she learned lack is not a thing you fix by feeding it polite food."
"She amended," Mira says, too loyal to call her grandmother wrong in a room this careful. "She changed the mechanism to be a hinge instead of a mouth."
"She did," Adrien says, with real admiration. "She fought the box with a hallway and won enough to save the bones of the house. But she left the anchor." He turns his head to Luca, more abruptly now, as if calling a witness at a hearing. "Do you feel V anywhere."
"Yes," Luca says, without pretending to ponder. "Her. And now her. And the word witness. And the counting. It tastes different. Desiderium is a draft under a door. Veritas feels like weight and no applause."
Mira's jaw tightens another millimeter. "How much can be done at night without breaking what we've built."
Adrien's answer is swift. "Name it. Do not carve it. Do not sign it in blood or bragging. Speak it where the letter belongs and let wood decide how much it can bear before dawn." He looks at Elara. "You will do nothing but count."
"I can count," Elara says, fierce.
"Father," Luca says, linen, careful, "ask me one more. Something you didn't get to ask the first time because you were shouting."
Adrien rubs his stubbled chin with the back of a wrist. "What do you regret first when a room gets louder."
Luca considers and does not pose. "How quickly I believe applause is a love language."
"And second."
"How quickly it works," he says.
"And third."
"How slow no travels when a room helps it be charming," he says, and Mira's throat moves—once—like a swallow.
Adrien nods into the mirror as if into the eyes of a man who has finally paid for a drink he ordered two decades ago. "Good." His attention returns to the baseboard. "Doctor, you tied five. You can hold this. We can ask the house to accept an amendment." He squares his shoulders away from drama, toward work. "I'll say the Latin because old wood respects old mouths, but you will speak the clause in whatever language your grandmother hated most."
"Plain," Mira says.
"Plain," he agrees.
"Not yet," she adds. "He just learned to be heavy without help. I won't change two variables and call it a night."
Adrien's hands spread: fair. He looks relieved to be denied heroics. "Then we diagnose. You'll sleep when arithmetic permits."
Elara, dutiful: "At eight?"
"At eight," Mira says softly, because promising someone else's morning is a kindness night can afford.
Adrien resumes the slow walk, circling to the mirror's left, then back along the wardrobe's face, pausing at the key. He crouches—age complaining in joints trained to kneel for less honest reasons—and peers at the braided figure-eight. "Left-handed," he says, pleased. "Seat, not strangle. Three is a good aunt. Five is a mother who remembers earthquakes."
"Family tradition," Mira says, deadpan.
"The key turning a hair on its own," he adds, glancing up at her, "that's good news."
"Yes?" Elara says, as if a story just chose her.
"It means the mechanism is willing to be involved without being flattered," Adrien says. "Amendments are easier with mechanisms. Spirits have opinions." He stands again and faces Luca, posture square to the pane. "Were you ever tied to the key in life."
"No," Luca says. "Only to the idea of keys. I collected them without the doors."
"Bars or bedrooms," Adrien asks, neutral.
"Both," Luca answers, unflinching. "Mostly the kind that could sit on a counter and start a story."
"Can you read the D," Adrien asks, nodding to the runes.
"On the bad nights," Luca says, "it hums under the floor like someone promising dessert."
"And V."
"It arrives with arithmetic," Luca says. "And when she says witness as a job. And when—" he hesitates, then confesses "—when no one is looking and I choose to be decent."
Adrien accepts it. "Then the cure is not Latin. It's bureaucracy with courage: you will keep your corridor; the clause will be moved by speech to truth; hunger will be demoted to a sensor, not a leash." He looks at Mira. "Tomorrow," he says, careful not to make decisions for a woman with chalk. "In the alley, when it's honest light. We will test the amendment where stains have chosen to be true."
Mira follows his eyes to the ledger's lower corner, where stain on alley brick persists sits like a scar on paper. "Agreed," she says, voice straight.
Elara exhales the sort of breath girls save for when they realize no one is about to be fired. "I can bring the bucket and not the brush," she offers, meaning: I will not erase proof with good intentions.
"Good," Adrien says. He returns to the chair and sits as if sitting were a clause obeyed by knees. "Until then, we keep hunger on the outside of the lock. Say it, priest, so your God hears you doing something useful."
Adrien smiles into his collar. He stays in French for the indulgence of the wood and then translates himself into plain. "No hungers invited. None amplified. None disguised as music. Desires admitted only when named and when they pay at the desk. Truth is the owner on duty." He nods to Mira: your turn.
Mira looks at Luca through the skin she taught to hold. "No amplifying," she says, for the hundredth time tonight, as if repetition wears grooves rooms can follow. "Anchor to truth. Corridor, not box. Down, not out."
"Present," Luca says, and the pane shows how not-performative a man can make that word when someone has handed him a rule he can keep.
Adrien tips an ear to the floor—old priest's habit—and listens. The hum is low, a good engine. The chandelier hits seven and does not preen. The candle's bead stands with good posture. The runes under the grain answer the last sentence by brightening for a blink—one, not two—and settling as if told a bedtime story they respected. Even the iron seems to have remembered that being warm does not commit it to being useful; it commits it to being ready.
"Questions for me," Adrien asks the glass, the salt, the woman with chalk.
Luca's is the first, and it is uncharacteristic in its smallness. "If the clause moves," he says, "and I am not tied to hunger anymore, will I still… want."
"Yes," Adrien says gently. "You're a man, not a thermostat. You will just want without being employed."
"And the room," Elara asks, because staff care about their shifts more than theology, "will it be less… expensive."
"Yes," Adrien says again. "It will sell weather again, not storms."
Mira keeps her hand an inch above the thread, fingers steady, jaw set. "And if the clause refuses to move."
"Then we escalate its shame," Adrien says. "We bring witnesses. We read margins in the lobby. We make Madame spend money on truth she can invoice." He smiles, apologizing without regret. "Policy."
The sea knocks—polite, measurable, a giant with good timing. They breathe on six. They stop on seven. The mirror keeps its sheen without thickening. The room, diagnosed, behaves like a patient who has decided to earn his breakfast.
"Again," Mira says, because nothing good is ever done once.
"One," Luca answers.
"Two," Elara whispers, delighted to be included.
"Three," Adrien adds, penitent and pleased.
"Four," says the chandelier, in its way.
"Five," hum the boards.
"Six," says the sea, fist to rock.
"Seven," says the woman with the thread, and all of them stop—hunger outside, truth on duty, breath the same on both sides of the glass.