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"You should sleep. Really sleep. Not the three hours you've been running on."

"I know."

"Do you still have the trazodone? From the prescription you mentioned?"

"Yeah. It's expired, though."

"Trazodone doesn't really expire. The efficacy drops a little but it's still safe. Take one. Fifty milligrams. You need a full night. Your body needs it."

Every word of it is care. I hear how it lands on him, the warmth of it, the man who just took him apart now tucking him in. And every word of it is also a dose and a timer and a lock I'm picking from inside his own medicine cabinet. Fifty milligrams, onset thirty to sixty minutes, peak at one to two hours. I looked it up twice.

"Okay," he says.

"Promise me."

"I promise."

"Same time tomorrow?" he asks.

"Every night, Milo."

The call ends. 1:22 a.m. One hour, twenty-one minutes, every second of it alive on the phone in my hand.

I sit in the empty office with myself still in my fist and the proof of what I did cooling on my stomach, and for the first time in three years I don't reach for the notebook. There's nothing clean to write.

I know the name for what I just did. It has a licensing board attached to it and a statute under that. A crisis counselor and a caller on a recorded line, the caller in the worst hour of his worst month, and I put my hand on myself and told him to come. I've written the words for less than this into other people's files. I could write them in mine. I don't.

I clean up with the napkins from my bag. I button my jeans. My hands are steady. They're always steady.

Then I do the thing I came in early to be able to do.

I open the archive. Not the call queue, the auto-capture, the backup every line feeds whether an operator wants it to or not, the one nobody opens unless a complaint or a subpoena makes them. Tonight's file sits at the top. One hour, twenty-one minutes. I run the cable to my phone and I pull it across, and I watch the bar fill, and I watch it land in the folder where the other nine already live, each one renamed with its date the way I rename all of them.

Then I go back into the system and I delete it.

Not to a trash folder. Gone. The purge takes a password and a confirmation and a second confirmation, the safeguards the center built so an operator couldn't lose a call that might matter in a courtroom someday. I have the password. Barbara gave it to me in the spring, when she made me the one who trains the new hires. Whatever you're doing, she told me last week, keep doing it.

The screen asks if I'm sure.

I'm sure.

The file disappears from the center's system and exists now in exactly one place in the world. My pocket. Mine. The same place he already is, and doesn't know it.

I put the headset back on. The line stays quiet. Twelve blocks away he's swallowing a pill I told him to take, lying down in a bed I'm going to be standing over before the week is out, going under with my voice as the last thing in his head and no idea that the voice has hands.

Same time tomorrow.

Every night.

Chapter Nine: Milo

The man at the coffee shop has brown eyes.

I don't know why that's the thing I keep. Of everything I could have kept… the book, the coffee, the way he sat… it was the eyes. They lifted from the page when Bean pulled toward the table, her nose working the legs of the metal chair, her tail going, and he looked at me for two seconds before going back to his book.

Two seconds. I've been thinking about it for hours.

Bean liked him. Bean doesn't like strangers. Bean tolerates strangers the way she tolerates the vet, with her body stiff, her ears flat, her tail low. Enduring the proximity until it ends. This man she pulled toward. This man she sniffed with her tail up, her body loose, the posture she uses with me and with Noor and with nobody else. She wanted to investigate his shoes. His ankles. The cuff of his jeans where they met the leather of a boot that looked worn in a way that meant he actually wore them, not in a way that meant he bought them pre-distressed.