The butler answered the door, raised his brows, glanced at the bottle and noticed the Hebrew on it. With pursed lips, he stepped aside and gestured to the drawing room.

“Mr. Meijer should be out momentarily.”

There was a flip of pages down the other way, and a drawn-out nose sigh that Uriel was probably well familiar with. He put his book down without bookmarking it and stepped out to meet his guest.

If God had any mercy, it was in allowing Zechariah not to notice his own brother’s questionably occurring hard-on when he opened the door.

For now.

Unaware of the grace offered to him from above, Zechariah’s face dropped with the notion he had been cursed. Whitby. Whitby! Hours and hours of travel and heckling strangers for directions to a place he had had to travel to by carriage in the end! A place he had been confident for years that no one could find him.

Alright. More wishful than confident.

Uriel certainly had persistence – he would give him that. Perhaps it would take him places after all.

“Uriel,” he said, and it was as much greeting as sigh. “Had I known you were coming –” he could have prepared the perfect excuse as to why he could not. “... Shabbat Shalom,” he relented with a tired smile.