Page 58

I stand between my own truck and a concrete pillar, bag on my shoulder, reading four numbers over and over. The page stays steady in my hand.

The third of April.

Nineteen days.

There’s a card in the inside pocket of the jacket I’m wearing, with a cell number and a woman’s name on it. It’s been there since twenty to ten this morning, and it’s eleven inches from the piece of paper in my hand.

I stand in a concrete garage under a light that hums and hold both of them.

Then I put the paper in the same pocket as the card and get in the truck. The door needs the shove it always needs, and the heater takes the whole harbor road to do anything at all.

He opens the door before I knock.

“Kieran.”

I hold the paper up between two fingers. He takes it, unfolds it, and reads it under the hall light.

He doesn’t react. “When?” I say.

“He gave you that tonight?”

“When did you know?”

He puts the paper down on the table by the door.

“She sent it to me the night of the game,” he says. “Ten days ago. It came in about half an hour before you got here. I read it and turned my phone face down. I decided not to tell you.”

“I was here that night.” My voice comes out thin and wrong. “I was in your bed that night. You held me down and you told me what I was. You knew about this thirty minutes before that.”

“Yes.”

“Say why.”

“Because I told myself you’d play worse for three weeks if you knew. That was her reason. I took it off her, used it. That’s what I’ve been doing since November.” He stays in the doorway, looking straight at me. “There was no version of it where I got to tell you and also got to have that night. So I had the night.”

I stand on the mat.

My chest hollows out the way it did when I was fifteen, standing in a kitchen with a woman’s coat gone from the hook. It goes through me, comes out the other side, and leaves nothing behind.

“You could have said it in the morning,” I say. “You made coffee instead.”

“I made coffee.”

“Marek.” I put my hand on the doorframe. “Are you telling me now because I’ve got the paper in my hand, or were you going to?”

“I wasn’t going to,” he says. “That’s the true answer, and you should have it. I was going to tell you on the second of April, the night before, the way I did the last one.”

I look at him.

Thirty-eight years old. Light brown hair going gray at the crown. Yesterday’s stubble, a shirt he’s been in since seven in the morning, the reading glasses pushed up on his head. There’s a crease on the left side of his face from falling asleep at the kitchen table while doing my filing on a laptop.

He sold his car. I worked that out on my own eight days ago, when he came out of my building on foot at half six in the morning in the rain and walked toward the bus stop on Weyburn. I sat in the truck watching him do it. I didn’t offer him a ride because I didn’t want him to know I’d seen it.

“You’re the only person who tells me anything,” I say, “and you’re a liar.”

“Yes.” He steps back out of the doorway. “Come in,” he says. “Or don’t. But I’m not going to stand here and be a better man about this.”

I come in. He doesn’t put the light on in the front room. I sit on the arm of his one chair with my coat on and he stands by the window.