Table seven came back on Thursday. He brought a friend.
Ro knew it was him before she looked up from the coffee machine. The diner had a particular silence that settled when certain customers entered, a kind of held-breath quality that she'd learned to recognize by feel rather than sound. It wasn't fear. The Hollow Crown didn't do fear, not here, not between these walls. It was more like... attention. The room noticing. The space itself paying attention.
She finished pulling the espresso shot, set the cup on the pass-through for Denise, and turned around.
Table seven was standing by the coat rack. Same grey coat, same carefully neutral expression. He'd brought someone. The someone was worse.
Not physically. Physically, the companion was almost unremarkable—medium height, medium build, wearing a charcoal suit that looked expensive and bored. But there was something about the way he held himself, something too still, like a mannequin that had learned to breathe. When he turned his head to survey the room, his eyes moved too slowly. Not lagging. Just... taking longer than they should.
Ro stepped back behind the counter. Her hands found the coffee pot without looking, which was good because she was looking at the companion's eyes.
Wrong color. Not just pale, not just strange. *Wrong*. Like the color had been chosen from a palette that didn't exist yet, something that would only make sense in a future where the sun had changed.
"Table's ready, hon," Denise called out. She was wiping down the menu board, oblivious. "Want me to seat them?"
"I'll get it."
Ro grabbed two menus. The menus were identical, laminated, boring. They offered eggs and disappointment in roughly equal measure. She carried them over to table seven, keeping her eyes on the laminated surface, on the smudge of ketchup she'd been meaning to clean.
"Good evening," table seven said. Same voice. Same careful modulation. "I hope we're not late."
"You're fine." Ro set down the menus. "Coffee?"
"Please. Black." He turned to his companion. "And for you?"
The companion smiled. It didn't reach his eyes, which were still that wrong color, and wouldn't stop being wrong no matter how many times Ro blinked.
"Whatever is freshest," he said. His accent was wrong too. English, but filtered through something that made each syllable sit too long in the air, like it was waiting for permission to leave.
"We have drip coffee. Tea. Hot chocolate." Ro kept her voice flat. Transactional. The way you talked to someone you weren't planning to remember. "No espresso after five AM, machine's already cleaned."
"Tea, then. Whatever suits."
She wrote it down even though she wouldn't forget. The ritual of the pad, the pen. Something normal to hold onto.
"Back in a minute."
She walked away without waiting for acknowledgment. Behind the counter, she filled the order with mechanical precision. Coffee for table seven. Tea for the companion. No rush, no fuss. The tea bags were in a tin behind the coffee maker, assorted flavors that Miriam had ordered from a wholesaler in Croydon. Ro picked Earl Grey because it was the most normal option available. The caffeine would keep the regulars awake, which was apparently the goal.
The coffee went into the machine. Water boiled. Denise hummed something from the radio.
"New guy's creepy," she whispered when Ro reached for the mugs.
"Don't."
"I know, I know." Denise held up her hands. "Don't notice things. But Ro, his *eyes*—"
"I didn't see anything."
"You didn't see his *eyes*? Come on."
Ro set the mugs down harder than she meant to. The rattle made table seven's companion look up. His gaze found hers across the room, and for a moment something passed between them—not recognition, exactly. More like acknowledgment. Two people who'd spotted the same flaw in the wallpaper.
Then he looked away, and Ro let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
"You okay?" Denise asked.
"Fine." Ro picked up the mugs. "Just—don't stare. Anyone. Tonight. Don't stare."
"I wasn't staring, I was—"
"Don't."
She carried the drinks over before Denise could argue. Table seven took his coffee with a nod that was almost a bow. The companion received his tea with two hands, like it was something valuable, something that might break. His fingers were long, too long, and the nails were perfectly clean in a way that suggested he'd never actually used them for anything.
"Sugar?" Ro asked, because that was the script.
"No, thank you." The companion lifted the cup. Something about the steam rising from it made him smile, and the smile was worse than his neutral expression. Too sharp. Too pleased. "This establishment is... older than it looks."
"Nineteen fifty-two," Ro said automatically. Miriam's spiel. Everyone got it eventually. "Same family. The sign's original."
"The sign," the companion repeated, tasting the word. "Yes. I noticed."
Table seven cleared his throat. A warning, maybe. Or just conversation. "The coffee is excellent, as always."
"It's diner coffee."
"Precisely."
Ro didn't know what to do with that, so she retreated. Behind the counter, she busied herself with tasks that didn't need doing—wiping the already-clean surface, rearranging the sugar packets by color, which she'd already done twice.
They stayed for two hours.
For two hours, Ro served other customers and didn't look at table seven. The college kid from Tuesday showed up again, ordered a stack of pancakes, and left without opening his textbook. A taxi driver came in, the same one who always came in at this hour, and complained about his dispatcher in the specific, detailed way of someone who needed to complain but didn't expect anything to change.
She kept track of it all. The normal things. The real things.
But her peripheral vision kept catching details she didn't want. The way table seven's companion never touched his tea after that first sip. The way his shadow seemed to point the wrong direction when the streetlight hit the window. The way table seven kept glancing at the door, as if waiting for someone, or something, to arrive.
At 4:47, the door opened.
The man who entered was ordinary. That was the first thing Ro noticed, and noticing it made her notice everything else. He was tall but not unusually so. Dark hair, somewhere between brown and black, depending on the light. A coat that had seen weather but was holding up well. Nothing about him should have drawn attention.
But he drew attention anyway.
He paused in the doorway, scanning the room with the kind of assessment that reminded Ro of museum security—professional, thorough, unhurried. His eyes moved past table seven without pausing. Past the companion, who stiffened almost imperceptibly. Past Denise, who had stopped humming.
Then his gaze found Ro's.
She was holding a coffee pot. She set it down.
"One for the counter?" she asked, keeping her voice level.
"Tea, if you have it." He approached the counter with long strides that ate up the space without seeming rushed. "Whatever is available."
"Earl Grey?"
"That will suffice."
She turned to the tea display, aware of his presence behind her in a way she couldn't articulate. He wasn't touching the counter. Wasn't shifting or fidgeting. Just... waited. With a quality of stillness that was different from the companion's wrongness. More controlled. More deliberate.
"Milk?" she asked, pouring water.
"No."
"Sugar?"
A pause. "Two cubes."
She found the sugar in the bowl Miriam kept by the register. The cubes were slightly irregular, having been scooped from a larger bag. Ro counted out two, dropped them in the cup, and turned around.
He was watching her hands. Not her face. Her hands.
"Three-forty," she said, setting down the tea.
He reached into his coat and produced a wallet. Leather, worn smooth. He counted out four pound coins and set them on the counter with precision that matched table seven's newspaper-folding. The extra sixty pence was tip. Exact change.
"Keep the difference," he said.
Ro swept the coins into her apron. "Thanks."
He said nothing else. Just lifted the tea and drank, his eyes moving away from her to survey the room. Past table seven. Past the companion. To the window, to the street, to something outside that Ro couldn't see.
She moved down the counter, began restocking the napkin dispensers that didn't need restocking. The night stretched on. The radio played something with a saxophone. Table seven and his companion left at five-fifteen, dropping cash on the table without waiting for change. The companion paused at the door, looked back—not at his companion, not at the room.
At the man with the tea.
The man with the tea didn't look up.
The door closed. The diner sighed in a way that had nothing to do with ventilation.
The man finished his tea at five-forty-three. Ro knew because she'd been counting minutes in her head, waiting for the shift to end, waiting for the sun to rise and the world to become normal again.
He set down the cup. It was empty. He'd used both sugar cubes.
"The coffee here," he said, his first words since ordering. "Is it worth trying?"
"It's diner coffee."
"You said that before. To the other patron."
Ro looked at him. Really looked. His face was symmetrical in a way that felt almost accidental, like he'd been assembled by someone following instructions too carefully. Nice-looking, objectively. The kind of looks that made you want to find a flaw, just to prove he was real.
She found one. His left hand, resting on the counter, had a scar across the knuckles. Straight. Precise. Not an accident. Not a kitchen injury.
"Same answer," she said. "It's diner coffee."
"Then I shall try it tomorrow." He stood, buttoned his coat—three buttons, from the top down, in correct order—and moved toward the door. "Good evening, Rowan."
She'd never told him her name. The nametag said RO. It had said RO for six months.
"It's Ro."
He paused at the door. Looked back. Not at her face—at her hands, still holding napkins she didn't need.
"Ro," he repeated. "Good evening, Ro."
Then he left, and the door closed behind him with a click that sounded almost apologetic.
Denise looked up from her phone. "Did he just—"
"I need a break." Ro shoved the napkins into the nearest dispenser, harder than necessary. "Back in ten."
She went out the side door, into the grey morning. The street was empty. No sign of table seven, his companion, or the man with the tea. Just delivery vans and the distant sound of a bus that was running early.
She lit a cigarette she didn't remember having. Smoked it down to the filter. Then another.
The man had tipped exactly right. Sixty pence for a cup of tea. Not more, not less. The kind of precision that made her think of scales, of balances, of people who understood that debts accumulated, that favors had weight.
She didn't know his name.
She didn't want to.
Ro finished the second cigarette, ground it out under her shoe, and went back inside. Denise was wiping tables that had already been wiped. The radio had moved on to something with synth.
"Weird night," Denise said.
"They're all weird."
"Yeah, but that guy—the tea guy—"
"Don't." Ro hung up her apron, counted her tips without really seeing the numbers. "Just... don't, okay?"
Denise looked at her. There was something almost knowing in that look, something that didn't fit with the horoscopes and the crystal healing.
"You knew," Denise said. "You knew before I did. The not-asking thing. The not-noticing."
Ro said nothing.
"How long did it take you? To learn?"
"I'm still learning," Ro said. "Every day. I'm still learning to not see what's right in front of me."
She grabbed her bag. Her coat. The coins in her pocket felt heavy, warmer than they should be, humming faintly against her hip.
"See you tomorrow, Denise."
"Yeah. Tomorrow."
She walked home the long way again. Passed the pharmacy, the betting shop, the convenience store where someone was buying bananas at exactly 6:12 AM. She didn't look. Didn't notice.
But she thought about the man with the tea. The way he'd said her name like it was a translation. The way his scarred hand had rested on the counter, perfectly still, perfectly patient.
He'd be back tomorrow. She knew he would.
And she'd pour his coffee, and she'd keep her eyes down, and she'd learn to not see whatever it was she was seeing.
That was the job. That was survival.
She had £38,000 of student loans to pay off. She didn't have time for mysteries. She didn't have time for men who knew her name without asking.
The sky was lightening when she reached her building. Somewhere, birds were starting to chirp, convinced that dawn meant safety.
Ro knew better.
But she was too tired to think about it. She unlocked her door, three locks, and stepped inside.
Tomorrow. She'd think about it tomorrow.
Or not at all.