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“That’s the end of March. You cooked in my mother’s pan on Saturday and you had this in your pocket the whole afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“You lay in my bed and let me tell you about June.”

“Yes.” One hand comes up about four inches, then goes back down. “Kieran, I need to say something.”

“No.”

“There are three things I haven’t told⁠—”

“No.” My voice stays perfectly flat, the way I’ve said it’s fine to a trainer four hundred times. “Every time you kept the truth from me, you had a reason. Every time, the reason was that you were protecting me. Every time, it turned out you were also protecting the arrangement.”

“That’s not true.”

“She has it all written down.” I put my hand out.

He looks at my hand.

He knows what it is. He works it out in about a second and a half. I watch him do it. Then he goes to the dish by the door where the keys live. He stops with his back to me for two seconds, then comes back and puts my spare key into my palm.

It’s warm. I’ll think about that warmth for a week. The key has been sitting in a bowl in a hallway, and it’s warmer than my hand.

“Ask me for the third one,” he says.

“What?”

“You said every time. Ask me for the third one. Ask me what she told me in that office on the twenty-third of February after you left the room. I’ll stand here and tell you. Then you can go.”

“I’m going anyway.”

“I know you are.” He doesn’t move out of the doorway. “Ask me.”

Behind him, the fridge cuts out and the apartment goes completely silent.

I put the key in my pocket.

“You’ve had five months,” I say. “You could have told me any night. You could have told me on Saturday.”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s nothing you can say.”

“Kieran—”

I go down the stairs.

He says my name once more from the top, not loudly. I hear it come down the stairwell and don’t stop. I get the street door open; cold comes off the water at me. Two men are outside the fish-and-chips place. They were there on Monday and have probably been there every day since 1988.

I sit in the truck on Alder Quay with the key in the ignition and my hand on it.

He doesn’t come down.

I count to sixty. Then I count to sixty again. The door at the top of those steps doesn’t open. The window with the wall four feet in front of it stays exactly as dark as it was on Wednesday night.

I drive home the long way, past the arena, where the marquee is already up for the twenty-fourth.

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