8:40 a.m. and the light comes in flat and gold across the mattress, the specific angle it only gets for about six weeks in October before the building next door swallows it whole again for the winter. I wake up alone, which I register the way you register weather — not good, not bad, just a fact about the day — and the first thing I see, before I see anything else, is the plants.

All forty-one of them, leaning east.

They do this every day, a slow greedy tilt toward whatever window is giving them the most, and every Saturday I go around and turn nine or ten of them a quarter turn so they don't grow permanently crooked, stems bent like they're straining to hear something. My father used to do the same thing to the drop cloths in his truck, folding them a different way each job so the paint didn't set a memory into the fabric. I don't know why I do it exactly the way he did it. I just do.

I'm on my knees in an old T-shirt, turning the pothos on the milk crate by the window, when I hear a car idle down on the street and let its engine run too long to be somebody dropping off a paper.

I know the sound of the Lincoln by now. That's its own small horror, that I have a car I can identify by ear through a closed window, the way you'd know your mother's key in a lock. I go to the window, cup my hands around my eyes against the glare, and there it is, parked wrong, half over the curb the way Bruno always leaves it like the car itself doesn't care about tickets because nobody would dare write one.

But Bruno's still in the driver's seat. Thermos in hand, visible even from two stories up, steam coming off the cap he hasn't screwed back down.

He's not getting out.

Which means somebody else already did.

I open the door before he knocks, because I hear him on the stairs — not creeping, not trying to be quiet, just a big man's weight coming up two flights at a normal pace, unhurried the way he's unhurried about everything, like time bends around him instead of the other way — and he fills the doorway the way he fills every doorway, no jacket, sleeves already rolled to the forearm like he came dressed for a job and not a visit. Five weeks and five days since he first crossed a cafe floor to tell me my lettering was a lie. I did not expect, five weeks and five days ago, that he would ever stand in this particular doorway, looking at this particular life.

"You're supposed to call first," I say, which isn't true, there's no rule, there's never been a rule, but it's the only thing that comes out and I need to say something before he says anything.

"I called Bruno," he says. "Bruno drove."

"That's not — " I give up on the sentence. Step back to let him in, because the alternative is standing in a doorway all morning arguing about a technicality neither of us cares about.

He comes in. And he looks.

Not rudely. Not the way Trevor used to look — Trevor's eyes always did an inventory that ended in a number, a value, a judgment he'd deliver later in installments, over weeks, disguised as helpful observations. Dominic just looks the way he looks at everything: like he's filing it, no expression attached yet, reserving comment. The bathtub against the kitchen wall, chipped enamel, a rubber mat hanging over the side to dry. The mattress on the floor with no frame, sheets pulled up but not made, the way you make a bed when nobody's coming. The gouache tubes crowded into a shoebox on the windowsill, caps crusted with dried color, cadmium yellow bleeding a stain into the cardboard. The coffee can on the shelf above the sink holding my father's brushes — the ones I didn't sell, the four I kept, sable going soft with age, one fan brush older than I am by five years, ten years and four months since he died with a heart that just stopped one Monday and nobody in the room to notice fast enough.

I watch his face for the thing Trevor's face used to do. The little flinch, quickly smoothed over, the recalibration of what he thought he was getting into. This is smaller than I pictured. This is worse than I pictured.

It doesn't come.

He just looks, the way you'd look at a room you were going to have to remember later, and then he says, "Radiator's still banging," which is true, it's already started up behind me, that iron clank like something trying to get out of the wall, and I say, "It's fine, I sleep through it now," which is a lie I've told myself so many times it almost passes for true.

He crosses to it. Kneels on the linoleum in front of it, in his good pants, without checking first whether the floor is clean, and takes a small brass key off his own ring — the kind you'd never guess had a use, buried between a car key and one I don't recognize — and fits it to the bleed valve at the top.

"You don't have to—"

"I know," he says, and turns it.

There's a hiss, air escaping, a thin whine that rises and drops, and a few seconds in a hot needle-thin jet catches the side of his hand — I see it happen, see the muscle in his jaw not move at all — and he doesn't pull back, doesn't swear, just lets it burn two fingers red before he shuts the valve again with the same unhurried patience he does everything with. The clanking stops. Just like that. Three and a half years since I signed this lease in February, three and a half years of that sound being the soundtrack of every night I've slept in this apartment, and it goes quiet in under a minute because a man knelt on my kitchen floor and let himself get burned without mentioning it.

"You're not going to say anything about your hand," I say.

"What's there to say."

I don't have an answer for that so I go make eggs instead.

The pan is the one good one I own, the nonstick with the handle held on by a single working screw, and I use the last of the butter, which means I'll need to buy more, which means one more thing added to a list that's already too long, and I don't say any of that out loud, I just crack the eggs and listen to them hiss and think about how strange it is to be cooking for someone in a kitchen with a bathtub in it while he stands two feet away like this is the most normal thing in the world.

"Coffee's instant," I say, apologizing before he's even asked, an old reflex, the sentence halfway out of my mouth before I catch it — I'm sorry the coffee's bad, I'm sorry the pan's cheap, I'm sorry the apartment is this size, I'm sorry, I'm sorry — and I hear myself doing it and hate the sound of it, hate that some very old machine in me still runs this program by default, hate that I built it for Trevor and it's still installed like software I never uninstalled.

Dominic doesn't answer the apology at all. He just says, "Fine," and takes the mug when I hand it to him, and drinks it black, standing at the counter, not sitting, because there's exactly one chair and it has a towel over the back where I dry dish rags.

I plate the eggs. He eats them standing up, using the fork like it's an inconvenience, three bites and they're gone, and he says, chewing the last of it, not looking at me, "Better than the Bellini's."

I almost laugh. It's such a small thing to say and I understand immediately, with a kind of dumb electric jolt, that it's the biggest thing he's said to me all morning — bigger than the burned hand, bigger than fixing the radiator — because I have watched this man for five weeks and I have never once heard him praise anything unprompted. He criticizes. He accounts. He states facts in a voice that makes them sound like verdicts. He does not compliment eggs.

"They're just eggs," I say, because I don't know what else to do with it.

"They're good eggs," he says, like correcting a math error, and goes to put the plate in the sink himself, rinsing it under the tap with the same hand that's still faintly reddened at two knuckles.

He offers it once. Just once, and flatly, like he's noting an available option rather than pushing an agenda.

"There's a building on Federal Hill," he says. "Heat that works. Better locks."

"No," I say.

"Okay," he says, and that's it. He doesn't repeat it. Doesn't circle back to it twenty minutes later dressed differently, doesn't bring it up again over the eggs or on the fire escape or in the car later, doesn't make it a wound he keeps pressing to see if it's tender yet. He just puts the plate in the drainer and lets the subject close on its own, and I stand there in my own kitchen absorbing the strange, quiet violence of being told no and having it taken, because Trevor would have raised that same offer eleven times across a single afternoon, dressed in eleven different outfits — concern, then logic, then hurt, then a joke that wasn't a joke, then silence calibrated to make me fill it by agreeing — and I would have ended up in the better building whether I wanted to or not, believing the whole time it had been my idea.

Dominic just accepts no like it's data. Filed. Done.

I don't know what to do with how much that unsettles me, in the good direction, the direction that's somehow worse than the bad one because I don't have a name ready for it.

We go out onto the fire escape because the sun through the kitchen window has gotten too good to waste indoors, that particular October gold that only lasts an hour before the angle changes and the building next door eats it whole for the season. I've painted the ironwork here in overlapping colors every year since I moved in — a streak of my mother's old porch blue from one summer, a rust-orange from another, a patch of white I did badly two winters ago that's already flaking — and the black underneath shows through in cracks like something the paint is trying to hide and failing at.

The metal's hot enough under my palm to sting through my sleeve, even with the air itself running cold against my face, that specific fall contradiction where the sun lies about the whole rest of the world. I climb out first. He follows, and the platform was built for one person with a folding chair and a watering can, not for a man his size, and he takes up two-thirds of it without apology, knees drawn up, back against the brick, close enough that his shoulder is a solid line of heat all down my left side even though we're not touching.

I get my sketchbook and the shoebox of gouache and start painting, badly, the way I always paint out here — fast, loose, not trying to be good, just trying to move color around until something in my chest loosens — the neighbor's chimney, a pigeon that won't hold still, the particular grey-blue of the sky where it hasn't quite committed to autumn yet.

"What are the plants for," he says, after a while, watching me mix cadmium yellow into something duller.

"What do you mean, for."

"Forty-one of them." He says the number like he counted them on the way in, which he probably did. "That's not decoration. That's a system."

I think about it honestly instead of joking my way past it, which is new, I notice myself doing something new. "They're what I keep alive," I say. "That's it. That's the whole answer."

He doesn't make it a joke. Doesn't say something about needing a hobby, or ask if I've considered a dog instead, the way Trevor once did when he found forty-one houseplants a faintly embarrassing amount of houseplants for a woman with $40 in her account. Dominic just nods, once, like I've handed him a fact that closes cleanly, no follow-up needed, and looks back out at the chimney.

The thing he says next comes without a run-up. No warning in his face, no gathering of himself the way people gather before a confession.

"My mother kept plants," he says. "Pressed leaves in a book. Knew the Latin on all of them."

I go very still with the brush in my hand, gouache drying to a skin on the bristles.

He hasn't mentioned his mother. Not once, in five weeks — not the storeroom, not his house, not the dinner where Gianni Trafficante's questions circled everything but never touched this, not Nunzio's cryptic remarks in the front hall. I know she's dead the way I know a handful of other facts about him: sideways, through silence shaped like an absence, a door in his house he never opens. And now here it is, offered flat and small and unprompted, out on a fire escape in October sun, like a coin set down on a table and immediately covered by his hand again.

I feel the question rise in my throat — what was her name, what happened, when — and I feel, just as fast, the old trained reflex to chase it, to pull, to need the whole story right now because not knowing feels unbearable.

I don't ask.

It costs me something to not ask. I feel the cost specifically, a held breath, my tongue against the ridge of scar tissue inside my lip, and then I let it go, and the not-asking sits in my chest afterward not like fear but like something closer to strength, a muscle I didn't know I had flexing for the first time. Four years of a life spent reading rooms before they turned dangerous, cataloguing tone and posture and the exact temperature of a silence to know which direction to duck — and this is the first silence from a man that doesn't feel like a trap being set. It just feels like a door left open an inch, the way Dominic's own front-room door was left open an inch that day at his house, on purpose, generous in its limits.

He closes it again himself, a few seconds later, looking back out at the chimney like the sentence never happened, and I let him have that too.

Bruno honks once, short, at two o'clock exactly, the sound coming up off the street flat and final.

Dominic gets up off the fire escape without ceremony, climbs back through the window into the kitchen, and I follow him down off the ladder of my own life feeling the loss of his heat along my side the second he's gone from beside me.

At the door he stops. Doesn't say goodbye — I've noticed this about him now, that he doesn't perform the small transitions people usually perform, doesn't soften an exit with a sentence built for softening — he just reaches past me to the hook by the door where my spare key hangs on its bent nail, the one Simone doesn't use because she has her own, and he takes it down.

He holds it up. Level with my face, between two fingers, so I can see exactly what he's doing before he does it.

I look at the key. I look at him.

I nod.

He pockets it and goes down the stairs at the same unhurried pace he came up them, and I hear the Lincoln's door open and close, and the engine that was idling the whole time finally pulls away from the curb.

I go back out onto the fire escape alone.

The sun's lower now, the good hour almost spent, that gold going amber at the edges the way it does right before the building next door swallows it for the winter. I turn the last few plants I didn't get to this morning — the jade plant on the sill, leaning hard, and the two ferns crowded together on the crate — giving each one its quarter-turn toward the light while it's still worth turning them toward.

Then I sit back down on the warm iron, knees drawn up the way his were, my paint-stained hands loose in my lap, palms up, the yellow and burnt sienna dried into the creases of my knuckles the way it never quite washes all the way out anymore.

The radiator behind me, through the glass, sits silent. First time in three and a half years it hasn't made a single sound by two in the afternoon.

I sit there a long time, longer than the sun really lasts, until the warmth goes out of the metal under me and the cold underneath it comes up through my jeans, and somewhere in that stretch of quiet, with nobody in the apartment and nobody on the fire escape and nothing left to perform for, I say it out loud. Just to the plants. Just to the empty kitchen behind the glass, and the chimney, and the grey-blue sky I never quite got right in the sketchbook.

"I want him."

That's all. No qualifier after it, no joke to take the weight back out of it, no God help me* the way I'd have tacked on a week ago to prove to myself I still knew better.

Just the plain fact of it, sitting in my chest the way the sun sat in the iron — quiet, warm, and, for once, not asking me to apologize for the size of the room it's taking up.