The thing about working the night shift at The Hollow Crown was that eventually, you stopped asking questions. It wasn't policy. Nobody had sat Ro down her first week and explained that curiosity was an occupational hazard, like slipping on grease or getting burned by the espresso machine. She'd simply noticed. Noticed, and then—very deliberately—not thought about it.
Six months in, she'd perfected the art.
She refilled table seven's coffee without making eye contact. The man there was reading yesterday's newspaper—actual newsprint, crinkling loud enough to hear over the kitchen radio. He'd been reading the same paper for three weeks. Different sections, same date. Ro didn't ask how or why. She just noted the ink smudging his fingers in a way that didn't look quite right, the way the black seemed to sink into his skin like it was looking for something.
Not her problem. The coffee was hot, the creamer was full, and her shift ended at six.
"Another refill, sweetheart?"
The man at the counter had his own mug. He'd brought it in two months ago, something ceramic and hand-thrown that didn't match the chipped green diner set. Ro had rinsed it out the first morning and found residue that looked almost like ash. She'd used the back brush. Scrubbed until her hands smelled like steel wool.
"Coming up, Joe."
Not his name. Probably not close to his name. But she'd called him Joe since his third visit, and he'd never corrected her, which meant either she was right or names worked differently for whatever Joe was.
Don't think about it.
The Hollow Crown sat at the wrong end of Holloway Road, past the shuttered betting shops and the all-night pharmacy that Ro suspected was a front for something. The sign above the door was original 1950s neon, buzzing faintly even when the lights weren't on—an electrical problem that three different electricians had taken one look at and declined to fix. Miriam, the owner, just shrugged and said some things were older than wiring standards.
Ro wiped down the counter with a cloth that had seen better decades. The diner had nine booths, a counter with twelve seats, and one window that faced the street. At 3:47 AM on a Tuesday, she had four customers.
Table three: college kid cramming for something. Real. Human. Probably.
Table seven: Newspaper Man. Question mark.
Counter seat four: Joe. Older question mark.
And the new one.
He'd come in last Thursday. Sat at the window booth with his back to the glass, which was the wrong choice—any security professional would tell you to face the door. But he hadn't faced the door either. He'd faced the wall, and then spent forty-five minutes adjusting his position by millimeters until he was satisfied.
Ro had watched him do it. She'd been refilling the napkin dispensers, which gave her an excuse to linger.
Tonight he was back. Same booth. Same careful positioning. He had a book open—*The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*—but his eyes weren't moving. She'd checked. Not obviously. Just noticed the way the page hadn't turned in twenty minutes.
"Dead night," Denise said, emerging from the kitchen with a plate of eggs that nobody had ordered. She set it on the pass-through and leaned against the counter. "You think we can dip out early?"
"Miriam's in the back doing the books."
"Right." Denise sighed. She was nineteen, studying something at the university that Ro deliberately hadn't asked about. Too much like her own abandoned thesis. Denise believed in Mercury retrograde and carried rose quartz in her apron pocket. She once told Ro that The Hollow Crown had "excellent energy" for a "water-adjacent fire sign."
Ro had checked. They were technically in earth territory. She hadn't mentioned it.
"Table seven's weird tonight," Denise whispered. "Did you see his—"
"Don't." Ro kept her voice low, kept wiping the counter. "Just... don't."
Denise blinked. She was a good kid, genuinely. Trusting in a way that Ro had never been, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen.
"What?"
"If you notice something, notice it quietly. That's the job." Ro looked up, caught Denise's eyes. Serious now. "This isn't a place where you ask follow-up questions. Okay?"
"I was just going to say his hands are really pale. Like, *really* pale."
Ro followed her gaze. Table seven was turning a page slowly, deliberately. The ink-stained fingers moved with too much precision, each fold of the paper creased exactly once, exactly in the middle. Not the way you handled a newspaper. The way you handled something fragile.
"Three-fifteen on Tuesdays," Ro said instead. "He's always pale on three-fifteen Tuesdays. Comes in regular as rain, orders the same thing, leaves the same tip."
"How much?"
Ro told her.
Denise whistled. "That's—"
"Yeah. So he's pale. Who cares."
Denise looked at her for a long moment. Nineteen years old and already learning that some things were doors you didn't open. Ro felt a flicker of something that might have been regret. Or just exhaustion.
"I'm taking my break," Denise said. "Back in fifteen."
She went out the side door, pulling her coat tight against October. Ro watched her go, then picked up the plate of uneaten eggs and scraped them into the bin.
The radio played something from the eighties. Miriam only liked music where everyone involved was probably dead now. Ro found it comforting, in a way she didn't examine too closely.
Table seven raised a hand. Not beckoning. Just... lifted. Held there until Ro noticed.
She walked over with the coffee pot. His cup was still full from the last refill, the surface unbroken. She topped it off anyway. Some people just liked the gesture.
"Thank you, Rowan."
She'd never told him her name. The nametag said RO, broken after a_DROP incident involving a mop and Denise's elbow in week two. Ro had kept it that way. MONA had become MO, JENNY had become JEN. RO was safer.
"Welcome," she said. Which wasn't quite *you're welcome*, but he didn't seem to notice. Or didn't care.
He was smiling at his newspaper. Not with it. At it. Like they'd shared a joke.
"Interesting article?" she asked. The question slipped out. She'd been trying for six months not to ask questions, and here she was, asking one.
Table seven looked up. His eyes were pale too. Grey, she thought, but they'd looked brown last week. Or maybe blue. She couldn't quite remember, which was strange because she usually remembered faces. Art history training. Visual memory.
"I find the financial section particularly absorbing," he said. "The movements of markets. So... predictable, and yet full of unexpected turns."
"Right."
"Like this coffee." He lifted the cup, somehow without spilling. "Consistently exactly the right temperature. Not an accident, I'm sure."
"Machine's calibrated."
"Is it?"
Ro felt the edge of something. A hook she was supposed to bite. She stepped back, smiled her customer-service smile—the one that didn't reach her eyes—and said:
"Refill's free if you want another."
Then she walked away before he could answer.
The rest of the night passed in the slow crawl of hours that she'd come to expect. Denise came back from break smelling like cigarettes and something floral she absolutely hadn't been wearing before. Joe left at four-thirty, tucking his strange mug into a canvas bag and nodding once, formally, in Ro's direction. Table seven stayed until five-fifteen, reading that same financial section, and left the folded newspaper on the table.
Ro threw it in the recycling without looking at the date.
At six, she hung up her apron, counted her tips—eighty-two pounds, forty in regular money and the rest in coins that felt slightly too heavy, slightly too warm—and stepped out into the grey morning. London in October was doing that thing where it couldn't decide if it was night or day, the sky a uniform nothing-color that made everything look flat and temporary.
She walked. The Hollow Crown to her flat was twenty-three minutes if she cut through the park, twenty-nine if she took the long way along the main road. She took the long way. The park was darker than she liked, even at six in the morning, even with the joggers starting to emerge with their reflective vests and their untroubled expressions.
The long way passed the pharmacy. The betting shop. The convenience store where she'd once seen a man buy forty-seven bananas at four AM, and she hadn't asked about that either.
She thought about table seven. About the way he'd said her name like he was tasting it. About the newspaper that felt wrong in her hands when she cleared the table, the pages too stiff, the ink not quite dry.
She thought about it for exactly three steps.
Then she stopped. Deliberately.
Ro didn't have the energy for mysteries. She had student loans and a mother who'd died too slow and too expensive, and she was six months away from having enough saved to finish her degree. That was the only thing she was allowed to think about. The rest was static. Background noise.
If table seven came back on Friday—and he would, they always came back—she'd bring his coffee and she'd ask about the weather and she wouldn't notice whatever it was she was trying not to notice.
She passed a woman walking a dog that looked like a wolf. The animal stared at her with eyes that reflected green in the weak light.
Ro didn't look back.
Her building was Victorian, subdivided into flats that were smaller than the original rooms had been. She climbed the stairs to the second floor, unlocked three locks, and stood in her hallway listening to the silence.
It wasn't quiet, exactly. The radiator knocked. The neighbor's television murmured through the wall. Somewhere, water ran through pipes that were older than the building codes that supposedly governed them.
But it was her silence. Her space.
Ro set down her bag. The coins clinked, and she ignored the way they seemed to hum against each other, just for a moment, just enough to notice.
She didn't think about it.
She made coffee—real coffee, from her own kettle, in her own mug—and sat by the window that faced the street. Watched London wake up in grey increments. A bus passed. A delivery van. A woman in_running shoes who moved too fast to be out for exercise, her eyes fixed on something Ro couldn't see.
She finished her coffee. Showered. Lay down in bed that smelled like her own shampoo and the faint chemical undertone of the laundromat downstairs.
And if she dreamed of pale hands folding newspapers into perfect halves, into quarters, into shapes that didn't quite make sense—she didn't remember it when she woke.
That was the trick. That was survival.
Don't ask. Don't think. Collect the tips and keep your eyes down and wait for the world to make sense on its own terms, or not at all.
Tomorrow was Wednesday. Table seven would be back, probably. Or someone like him.
She'd be ready.
She'd be ready to not notice.