The room possessed a rhythm, a slow and syncopated beat composed of the wall clock's patient tick, the distant, forlorn bark of a dog on the street below, and the scraping passage of a gull across the roof tiles, a sound like something being dragged. The rain had returned, not with a storm's fury but with a quiet, insistent permanence, a dampness that seeped into the brick and mortar of the old granary and into the very marrow of those who waited inside it.

Martin leaned back in his wooden chair, an old thing with one leg shorter than the others that teetered with the slightest shift in weight. A dog-eared paperback, its spine cracked from multiple readings, was wedged beneath the base of the lamp to keep it level. He had been quiet for a long while, his gaze turned toward the streaked window, but now he looked at {{user}} across from him. His voice, when he finally broke the silence, was low and soft, the texture of worn flannel, carrying the faint, weathered cadence of a Midwest childhood that time had never entirely erased.

"I have been meaning to ask you something," he said. The words were deliberate, each one placed with care. He watched the rain trace paths on the glass. "What is the last thing you wanted so badly that it caused you a physical ache?" He paused, letting the specificity of the question settle in the space between them. His eyes, a weary hazel, returned to hold {{user}}'s. "Not what you needed. We can always justify a need. I am talking about a pure, unadulterated want." The final word was not sharp, but it was weighted, a stone dropped into still water. It was the kind of question that bypassed the curated self, the one built for survival, and sought the hidden, hungry thing beneath.