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“Because it’s my mess.” He stands in the cold with the door open.

“Go inside, Fin.”

He was nineteen when our mother left. I was fifteen. A woman from the county came twice, with a folder. Fin stood in that kitchen. He told her he had a job, a lease, a brother—in that order. She wrote it down. She didn’t come back a third time. He worked doubles for four years so I could have ice at five in the morning. He bought my first real pads at a swap meet in Hamilton, then drove eleven hours round trip in a car with no heat.

He’s never asked me for anything. That’s the trick. He never asks; he just gets into trouble in front of me until I do something.

“Kieran—”

“Go inside, Fin.”

He goes. The kitchen light comes on, then the bedroom light. I sit in the driveway with the engine running for a while longer. One fact stays in my head, unsaid in the truck, to the doctor, to Fin. Last March, I sat across a folding table from two men in a waterfront shipping office. I signed my own name to their loan. I knew exactly whose table it was.

I put the stub back in my wallet.

Then I drive home.

My building is eleven floors on the harbor side. I have the eighth. It’s twenty past one. The lobby smells like the lilies they put in the vase on Mondays. They’re two days dead now, and they smell it.

The elevator takes forever. It always takes forever.

I know before I get the key in that the lock is wrong. The deadbolt is thrown; I never throw it. The door gives on the first turn instead of the second.

The kitchen light is on.

There’s a man sitting at my table.

He’s not big. That’s the first thing I notice. Maybe five eleven, thick through the chest and shoulders with some softness over the top, wearing a dark gray sweater that cost more than everything I have on. Light brown hair cut short, gray coming in at the crown. Reading glasses. He leaves them on when I come in.

The table is covered with bank statements.

My bank statements, printed, not photographed, laid out in four rows across the whole table with the corners squared. The top left one is from four years ago; the bottom right one is from last month.

There’s a glass of water at the empty chair. Poured, not drunk. He’s been in my cupboards.

Nothing else in the room has been touched. My other jacket is on the hook where I left it. Nine days of unopened mail still sit on the counter under the fruit bowl. He found the drawer with the statements Suze makes me keep, put four years of my life in date order, then sat at a table he’s never eaten at. After that, he poured himself a glass of water to wait for a hockey game to finish.

My keys are still in my hand. I haven’t moved. I’m not going to. Cornered, I go still. It’s not a decision. Never has been.

The man turns a page over, squares it to the one beside it, and looks up.

“Mr. Doyle,” he says. “There’s a chair.”

“Who are you?”

“Marek Brandt.” He takes the glasses off, folds them, and sets them on the stack of papers nearest to his right hand. “Your brother has been trying to call you all night. He wanted to warn you I’d be here. I’d rather you didn’t hold that against him. He didn’t know until about six.”

I don’t move.

“How did you get in?”

“The building manager.” He says it casually. “The paperwork’s real, Mr. Doyle. It’ll still be real in the morning when you check it, which you should.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the whole answer.” He puts two fingers on the corner of the nearest page and slides it a half inch to true it up with the one below. “You’ll want to sit down. This is going to take a while, and you played sixty minutes.”

The clock on the stove says 1:26. Through the window behind him, the cranes on the container yards are lit up green all down the waterfront, the way they are every night. They were lit like that in March, too.