Alistair had been counting since the second bottle: Gareth folded three times on a pair he should have raised, Dax down two hundred and pretending not to know it, and a light on at the end of the corridor that nobody had mentioned in ninety minutes.
He squared the last column of chips with two fingers and set his glass down exactly where it had been.
"You should fold," he said.
"I know."
"You should fold, and go to bed, and instead you are going to lose this hand slowly, because losing slowly is the only thing in this house you are still allowed to do at your own pace."
Gareth looked at him the way a general looks at a bad map.
Dax laughed once and did not look up. "He’s got a point."
"I have a point," Alistair agreed. "I am also the Brit, apparently, after twenty years."
Nobody apologised. Twenty years was twenty years.
He knew the exact value of what he was doing with his evening. That was the trouble with being the one who noticed. The corridor light had been on since eleven, he had heard the floorboard above the kitchen at half past, and he had known for a week what the arrangement of Gareth’s face meant when a door opened.
He also knew what it would cost a man to say a thing like that out loud in this house, so he said the other thing instead.
"Raise, or fold. Or tell me what you are actually sitting here waiting for."
Gareth folded.
"Charming," Alistair said, and stacked his own chips, because he could tell when a game was over even when nobody had said so.
He was the last one at the table. He put the cards back in the case, squared it, and left one card face up in the middle of the oak — the queen of hearts, which he had been holding for two hours — where you would find it in the morning if you came down before the house did.