The marketing lead is maybe twenty-six, wears a lanyard from a company that didn't exist eighteen months ago, and says the words "bringing design in-house" with the exact cadence of someone who has practiced them in a mirror.

"We really appreciate everything you've done," he says, sliding a folder across a conference table that smells like new carpet glue. "The brand's just going in a different direction."

The different direction, it turns out, is a direction his cousin's design degree can go in for free.

I don't cry. I want that on the record somewhere, even if the only person keeping the record is me. I sit in the Fall River parking lot afterward with my portfolio case on the passenger seat and six weeks of unpaid label comps inside it — cadmium yellow olive branches, a font I redrew four times because the client kept saying "more Tuscan" without being able to say what that meant — and I do the math out loud in the car because there's nobody else to hear it.

Six weeks. Zero dollars. A dead phone, because I forgot the charger, because my life right now is a series of things I forget because I am spending all my attention elsewhere, on a man who logs my chair movements in a leather notebook.

My car won't start. Not won't-start dramatically — won't-start the way it's been threatening to not-start since July, a long grinding cough and then silence, like it's embarrassed for both of us. I sit there with my hands on the wheel for a full minute before I let myself feel the shape of the day, and then I get out and start walking toward the gas station on the corner because at least a gas station has a phone charger for sale, even if I can't afford it.

I don't call anyone. There's nobody dead-phone-broke enough to call collect and rich enough to come get me, and asking Simone would mean explaining Fall River, which would mean explaining the client, which would mean explaining why I took a six-week unpaid gig from a company two exits past where anyone sane does business, and I don't have it in me today.

So when the black Lincoln is idling at the curb outside the gas station forty minutes later, I don't ask how it found me. I've stopped being surprised by that particular math.

Bruno is leaning against the driver's door in a short-sleeved bowling shirt — pineapples, this one, faded from washing — on a fifty-two-degree day like the temperature is a rumor he's chosen not to believe. He's got his arms crossed over a stomach that moves when he breathes, unhurried, and he doesn't straighten up when he sees me, just tips his chin.

"He figured you'd need a ride," he says, and opens the rear door before I've said a single word, before I've agreed to anything, holding it the way a man holds a door for someone he's decided is already inside.

I get in. Not because I don't have a choice — I could say no, I could walk to the bus stop, I could stand in the gas station lot until my dignity reassembles itself — but because it's fifty-two degrees and I'm out six weeks of my life and there's a version of today where somebody, anybody, decided in advance that I might need something, and I am too tired to turn that down on principle.

—

Dominic is on the far side of the bench seat. Jacket off, tie already gone — it's always already gone by the time I see him, like the tie exists purely as a formality he performs for other rooms — reading a single folded sheet of numbers I don't understand and don't try to. Union figures, maybe. Something with columns.

He doesn't look up when I get in. He says, "Fall River didn't go well," which isn't a question, and I understand immediately that he already knows, that Bruno told him on the drive over or knew before that, that my humiliation arrived at this car before I did.

"They're bringing design in-house," I say, and I hear how flat my own voice comes out, how I'm already performing not-caring before I've finished not caring. "In-house being the marketing guy's cousin, probably. I did six weeks of work I'm not getting paid for."

"I know," he says, and goes back to his column of numbers.

The car pulls out. Bruno drives the way he does everything, unhurried, both hands loose on the wheel, and 195 ahead of us is already thick with the four-thirty backup that starts an hour before it should and ends an hour after it needs to.

I smell him before I register anything else — gun oil, bitter espresso, orange peel, the same three things every time, filling the space of the back seat like water finding its level — and underneath it, when I lift my own hand without meaning to, grapefruit and the ghost of gouache still caught in the creases of my knuckles from a job I did at six this morning before Fall River ate the rest of my day. Two different smells occupying the same six feet of leather seat. I think, absurdly, that if you bottled both of them and put them side by side, nobody would guess they belonged in the same room, and yet here we are, thirty-six inches apart on a bench seat built for three, breathing each other's air on 195.

He doesn't touch me. That's the thing I notice first and can't stop noticing — that he has answers for everything else, his hand on my collar, on my wrist, in my hair, but here, now, in a car with traffic outside and Bruno's shoulders visible over the front seat, he sits with the sheet of numbers on his knee and doesn't reach across the space at all, and it is somehow louder than if he had.

"The tracker," he says, after a while, in the tone of a man reading off intake paperwork. "When did you find it."

"Sunday. The eighth."

"Where."

"Wheel well. Rear, driver's side."

"Model."

"I don't know models. Black. Plastic. Magnetic. The size of a—" I stop myself before I say deck of cards, because that's Simone's phrase from a conversation he wasn't in, and I don't know why it matters that I keep the two of them separate, but it does. "About the size of a phone. Older than a phone. Heavier."

"What did you do with it."

"Threw it in a storm drain on Doyle Ave."

He doesn't react to that the way Simone did — no closed eyes, no held breath, just a small dry exhale through his nose, like he'd have done the same thing and thinks less of me for a half-second because I didn't think to keep it.

"Who has keys to your car."

"Nobody. Just me."

"Who set up your laptop. Originally. When you bought it."

I know where this is going four questions before we get there, and I let it get there anyway, because there's no version of this conversation where I get to keep the answer to myself, not with him, not in this car, not with the columns of numbers folded on his knee like he's got all afternoon and traffic to spend on me.

"Trevor," I say. "Trevor Lang."

He doesn't write it down. He has no notebook out — the notebook lives somewhere I've never seen, I realize, some pocket of a life I only get the edited version of — but I watch him take the name the way you'd watch someone catch a thrown object without looking, a small closing of the hand.

"We lived together," I say, because the silence wants filling and I've apparently decided this is the day I stop filling silences with sugar. "November of '17 to January of '21. He set up my laptop the first month we moved in. Router, printer, all of it. He's — he had a government job. Boston. Something with fraud."

That's the sentence I've had for seven years, the one I was handed and never once turned over to check the underside of. Government job. Boston. Something with fraud. It comes out of me smooth and worn soft, the way a stone gets smooth from being carried in a pocket, and I don't examine why it still fits so easily in my mouth.

Dominic's face does something. Not much — nothing anyone who hadn't spent two weeks cataloguing his stillness would catch — a fractional narrowing at the eyes, gone before it fully arrives, the specific look of a man filing a fact somewhere it doesn't yet have a folder.

"Say it again," he says.

"Trevor Lang."

"Full name."

"That is his full name."

He nods, once, and looks back down at his column of numbers like the conversation is over, but I clock it — the way he doesn't write it, doesn't repeat it back the way he did with mine that first day at the cafe, rolling the r's just to prove he'd caught it. He just holds it. Memorizes it the way you memorize a door you intend to walk back through later, when nobody's watching.

Traffic stutters forward six feet and stops again. Somewhere ahead a horn goes off, gets answered, dies.

"Your turn," I say, because I've given him a name and I want one back, some kind of exchange rate established between us before this whole thing becomes entirely one-directional. "What are you waiting for. At the cafe. Every day since March."

"I told you," he says. "A man."

"You didn't tell me who."

"No," he agrees, and folds the sheet of numbers in half again, a crease over a crease, like he's giving his hands something to do that isn't touching me. "I didn't."

"Dominic."

"A man who owes me a conversation," he says, and there's something underneath it, some old weight dragging the sentence down at the end like it's carrying more than the words can hold, and then he closes the door on it so completely that I understand, without him saying anything else, that asking twice today would cost me something I don't have the currency for yet.

—

"You want arancini," Bruno says from the front, not really a question, already reaching into a paper bag on the passenger seat that smells like fried rice and mozzarella gone slightly cool. "My mother's recipe. She'd be dead forty years and still slap me for how I do the breading, too thick, she'd say, you're not building a house, Bruno."

"I'd love one," I say, grateful for a reason to move my hands, and he passes back a foil packet with two arancini nestled inside like they're precious cargo, which, given the traffic, they might be for the next twenty minutes.

He talks the way I imagine he cooks — unhurried, generous, no wasted motion but no rush either — about a kitchen in a house that doesn't exist anymore, a mother who timed the rice by ear, a brother who used to steal them straight off the cooling rack and burn his fingers every single time and never once learned. It's a good story. It's the kind of story that would be funny anywhere else, and I laugh at the right places, and Dominic, beside me, doesn't say anything, just eats his own arancini in three bites with the specific gravity of a man who has heard this story fifty times and still wants to hear it again.

We sit there, six inches apart on a bench seat, rigid, chewing, while Bruno's mother's kitchen fills the car with something almost like warmth, and it is, I think, the strangest ordinary half hour of my entire life — arancini and 195 traffic and a dead client and a man beside me who just took another man's full name and put it somewhere I can't see.

"I lost six weeks of work," I say, into the quiet after Bruno finishes his story, because apparently today the truth just falls out of me whenever there's room for it to land. "I don't have — there's no invoice for it. It's just gone. Six weeks I could've spent on paying work, and instead I've got a folder of labels nobody's ever going to print."

I wait for him to offer something. Money, a name, a threat delivered to a marketing lead with a lanyard. I brace for it the way you brace for a step you know is missing before your foot finds the gap.

He doesn't offer anything. He listens — actually listens, his eyes on me and not on the numbers, not performing patience the way Trevor used to perform patience, chin tilted, waiting for his turn to correct me — and when I'm done he says nothing at all, just lets the silence sit there uncorrected, unfixed, mine.

I don't know what to do with that. I've spent so long either being handed solutions I didn't ask for or being told my problems were smaller than I thought they were that a man simply hearing me and not reaching for his wallet feels like standing on ground I haven't tested yet.

—

It's somewhere around minute thirty-six — I know because I've been counting, the way I count exits without meaning to, a habit that never left me even when the room is a car — that he reaches over and takes my left wrist.

Not fast. Not a grab. He turns it over in his hand the way you'd turn over a page you're not sure you want to read, palm up, and his thumb finds the two-inch scar there like he already knew exactly where it would be, like his hand had rehearsed the route.

"How'd you get this," he says, quiet, and I know he knows the frame story already — I gave it to him at the cafe, weeks ago, picture frame, it broke — and I know that this isn't him forgetting. This is him asking again to see if the story changes.

It doesn't. "Picture frame," I say. "It broke. I was reaching for it."

He looks at me for a second too long, his thumb still resting flat against the raised line of it, warm, and I feel the lie sit between us the way it always does, small and load-bearing, and he doesn't call it out. He just doesn't let go of my wrist either, not for the rest of the drive, his thumb moving once, slow, along the scar like he's reading it in braille, and I let him hold it because the alternative is pulling away, and I don't, God help me, want to pull away.

Traffic breaks somewhere near the Providence line and the last stretch goes fast, streetlights strobing through the window in a rhythm that makes the whole car feel like it's underwater, and then we're turning onto Doyle Avenue and Bruno is easing the Lincoln to the curb outside my building with the same unhurried care he's brought to everything else today.

Dominic still hasn't let go of my wrist.

"Your window latch," he says. "Fire escape side. It doesn't lock."

"It's fine, I put a—"

"It does now," he says, over me, flat, like he's reporting weather. "Somebody was there today."

I feel the words land somewhere behind my sternum, cold and specific. Somebody was there today. In my apartment. Among my forty-one houseplants and my mattress on the floor and the sketchbook with a sentence painted over in burnt sienna, while I was in Fall River losing a contract to a man with a lanyard, someone was inside my home fixing a latch I never told anyone was broken.

"You had someone in my apartment," I say, and it comes out smaller than I want it to.

"I had someone check your apartment," he says, like there's a meaningful distinction there, and maybe there is, and I'm too tired from the day to locate it.

I look up. My building is the same as always, brick gone soot-dark at the corners, the fire escape zigzagging up the side like a scar of its own, and my windows are on the second floor, second from the left, and the hall light behind the stairwell glass is on.

It's on because it's always on, timer bulb, Mr. Pariseau's one concession to safety in four years of otherwise ignoring the building. I know that. I've walked past that light a thousand nights.

Except right now, behind the frosted glass, something crosses it. A shoulder. A shape moving unhurried across the light the way a shape moves when it belongs somewhere, not the way it moves when it's trespassing, and my whole body goes cold before my brain catches up to why, the old two-inch scar under Dominic's thumb going tight and icy the way it always does before the rest of me understands there's something to be afraid of.

Bruno hasn't moved from the driver's seat. The engine's still running.

"Dominic." My voice comes out thin. "There's someone in my stairwell."

He follows my eyes up to the glass, unhurried, the way he does everything, and when he answers there isn't a flicker of alarm in it anywhere, which is somehow so much worse than if there had been.

"That's mine," he says.

My hand is already on the door handle. I don't remember putting it there. I sit with my fingers curled around cold metal, staring up at a shape moving behind frosted glass in the one room in the world that's supposed to be only mine, and I can't make myself decide whether what he just said is the safest sentence anyone has spoken to me in three years, or the first one that's actually terrified me.