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“Yeah.”

“You were slow off the post on the second one.”

I stop with the key in my hand. “Priya said that to me in a hallway three years ago.”

“I know,” he says. “She said it to me in a corridor tonight. She sat next to me in the second intermission, bought me a coffee, and said she has no opinion about any of it.”

He gets in the truck.

I stand in the parking lot for a second with my hand on the roof until I can trust my face again. Then I get in, too.

Fin hires him on Monday.

He doesn’t ask me first, which is the correct thing to do. At eight in the morning, he turns up at my apartment with a cardboard box of paperwork under his bad arm. He puts it on my kitchen table and says he’s been doing his own books since 2011 with a shoebox and a woman two towns over who charges him four hundred dollars every April to tell him he’s done it wrong.

“Two days a week. Three fifty a day. You tell me what I owe you, and I’ll pay it. If you steal off me, I’ll come round.”

“You can’t afford three fifty a day.”

“That’s why I need you, isn’t it,” Fin says.

I drive out on my off day the following week.

The yard is open again. It’s been open since the spring before last. The padlock is gone. There’s a second truck and a portable office up a set of external steel steps with a window over the yard.

I can hear them from the bottom of the steps.

“That’s not a receipt. That’s letterhead.”

“He wrote the number on it.”

Marek taps the spreadsheet. “He wrote a number on letterhead, Fintan, in ballpoint, for eleven hundred dollars of copper. You gave him cash out of the tin.”

“He’s been doing my copper for nine years!”

“Then he can manage a receipt.”

I go up and stand in the door of the portable office. My brother stands over a desk with both hands flat on it, drywall dust in his hair. Marek sits in a swivel chair wearing a cardigan, a spreadsheet up and his glasses on the end of his nose. Neither looks up for about four seconds.

Then Fin turns round.

“Tell him,” he says. “Tell him about Danny.”

“I’m not telling him anything,” I say. “I’ve come for a cup of tea.”

Marek looks at me over the top of the glasses. His eyes crease a little—the expression he has now, small and contained. Then he goes back to the spreadsheet.

I stand in the doorway of a heated portable office above a contracting yard and drink tea from a mug with a tile company’s name on it. The two of them argue about the piece of letterhead for nineteen minutes. Fin calls him Brandt when he’s annoyed and Marek when he wants tea. Marek has started keeping a spare pair of reading glasses in the top drawer of the desk. Neither of them has asked me whether this arrangement is permanent. Nobody needs to.

At the end of the month, Fin gives me eight thousand dollars.

He does it badly. He’s been building up to it all through dinner and he does it at the door with his coat already on, standing in my hallway with a bank transfer confirmation on his phone held out at arm’s length like it might explode.

“It’s eight,” he says. “It’s not enough. I know. But it’s eight. There’ll be eight more in June. Then it’s the roof money in the fall.”

My first impulse is to tell him to keep it. I’ve said that a hundred times in his life, and meant it every time. It’s the reason we’re both standing in this hallway.

“Okay,” I say.