The cold snap came in overnight, the kind that turns Providence honest about what month it actually is, and my arm has been aching since I woke up — not the whole arm, just the two inches of scar tissue on my left forearm, deep under the skin where no lotion reaches, a dull electrical hum like a filling gone bad. I keep rubbing it without deciding to. I catch myself doing it at the sink, doing it standing at the window, doing it now, sitting at Dominic's kitchen table with my thumb working circles into the old scar like I can rub the weather out of it.

It does this every November. Has since 2019. I've stopped being surprised by it and started just waiting it out, the way you wait out a headache you know the shape of.

I've been in this kitchen for three hours. Alone, mostly — Bruno came through once around one to leave a grocery bag on the counter and didn't stay, said something about "checking the street" that I didn't ask him to elaborate on. The house has the specific quiet of a place built for a man who isn't home, radiators clicking, the mechanical clock in the hall doing its patient tock, and somewhere in that quiet I have had eight hours to compose several versions of the conversation I intend to have.

Dominic has been gone forty-eight hours. I know because I started counting at four p.m. Friday, when he left with his jacket already on and said "Fall River, back tomorrow" in the tone of a man reading a weather forecast, and tomorrow came and went, and here we are, Sunday, four in the afternoon, and the front door finally does its heavy click and his weight is in the hall.

He comes into the kitchen still in his coat. There's a shaving cut on his jaw, small, the kind you get rushing, and his watch is on a different strap than the one I know — brown leather instead of the steel band — and Bruno's shadow crosses the frosted glass of the front door and then retreats without coming in, which means Bruno dropped him and is waiting outside, which means wherever he's been, he came straight here without going home first.

"You eaten?" is the first thing out of his mouth. Not hello. Not I'm sorry I disappeared for two days. What do you want to eat.

"Where were you," I say.

He hangs his coat on the hook by the door, unhurried, like I asked him about the weather. "Fall River."

"For what."

"Work."

Two words. He says them the way you'd hand someone exact change, no bill big enough to require a receipt.

Something in my chest, already tender from eight hours of composing, goes tight. "That's it. Fall River. Work."

"That's it."

"You know," I say, and I hear my own voice go light and dangerous, the register I use when I'm about to be funny at somebody instead of honest with them, because it's easier to aim a joke than a fist, "if I'm three hours late texting you back, you call Bruno. You have Bruno check my street. You had a man in my stairwell for a week because I didn't answer fast enough once. And you get to just — vanish. Forty-eight hours. No text. Nothing. And I'm supposed to just trust that it was Fall River and work, full stop, the end, roll credits."

He doesn't flinch, doesn't even blink, just crosses to the counter and starts filling the percolator like this is a normal Sunday and I'm discussing something mildly interesting, the price of eggs, maybe. "You're comparing your stairwell to Fall River."

"I'm comparing the itemized life you keep on me to the receipt you hand yourself with no total on it." I'm proud of that one. I built it in the shower an hour ago and I've been waiting to use it. "You want to know when I found the tracker, what time, what model. You know my landlord's name. You know what my mother's hydrangea looks like from a man who's never met her. And you disappear for two days and the whole explanation fits on a matchbook."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The almost-smile, the one he does instead of laughing, which I've decided over eight weeks is worse than laughing, because laughing would mean I'd won and this just means I've amused him.

"You're funny when you're angry," he says.

"I'm funny all the time. You just don't notice unless I'm angry."

He turns from the percolator and looks at me directly, and there it is — the weather-occupying thing he does with a room, except right now I refuse to reorient toward it. I stay sitting. I make him come to me if he wants the temperature to change.

"Fall River," he says again, slower this time, like he's deciding how much of the sentence to actually give me. "There was a problem with a route. It's handled."

"That's not an answer, that's a headline."

"It's what you get."

"Great." I fold my arms, feel the scar throb under the fabric of my sleeve, rub it once through the wool before I catch myself. "Then let's talk about the electric bill."

His face doesn't change, which is its own kind of answer.

"Twelve months," I say. "Cash. No name. My landlord told me like it was good news. You got a boyfriend takes care of things. I had to call the utility company myself to confirm it wasn't a scam, and the woman on the phone told me anybody can pay my bill, I don't get a vote, the account just goes green."

"The radiator in your kitchen was going to kill your plants by December," he says. "I fixed the radiator. The bill was next to it."

"That's not — " I stop, breathe, start again, slower, because I promised myself in the shower I wouldn't sand this down, and sanding it down is exactly the shape my mouth wants to make right now. "You went around me. You didn't hand me anything. You went out into the world and you paid people so that the only way I'd ever find out is by accident, from a man who thinks it's romantic."

"Would you have taken it if I handed it to you?"

"No."

"There's your answer."

"That's not an answer, that's a justification for going around me, which is a different thing, and you know it's a different thing, because you're not stupid, you're the smartest person I've ever fought with, which is exactly the problem."

He doesn't say anything to that. He crosses to the counter, opens a drawer, and comes back with a plain white envelope, unmarked, and sets it on the table between us without a word. I don't touch it. I don't ask what's in it. I already know the shape of an envelope like that — thick enough to be real money, thin enough to look like nothing — and I sit there looking at it the way you'd look at a spider that hasn't moved yet.

"I'm not touching that," I say.

"It's not a test."

"Everything's a test. That's the whole architecture of you." I push my chair back an inch, just enough to put distance between my hand and the envelope, an instinct so old it doesn't ask my permission. "You want to know what happens when a man pays for things without asking? I'll tell you exactly what happens, because I lived it for four years and I have the receipts, literally, printed and everything."

He goes still in the particular way I've learned means he's actually listening, not performing listening — the stillness that isn't calm, the one Teresa Malandra warned me never to mistake for patience.

"Trevor paid my studio rent once," I say. "Years ago. Didn't ask. Told the studio manager to bill him. I found out secondhand, same as today, somebody mentioning it like it was a nice thing that happened to me. And I remember being grateful. That's the part that still makes me sick — I remember the gratitude, specifically, the taste of it, and it was warm and it was sick at the same time, like drinking on an empty stomach." I make myself keep going, because if I stop now I'll sand the rest down. "Six months later he had my invoices spread out on our kitchen table. Mine. That I printed for my own taxes. And he read them back to me line by line, in this voice like he was disappointed for me instead of in me, telling me why nobody would ever pay me properly if I billed my hours like that. And underneath every word of it was the rent. Sitting there like collateral. I take care of you, so I get to say this."

I stop. My arm is throbbing now, a real ache, cold-deep, and I realize I've had my hand pressed flat over the sleeve the entire time I was talking, like I could hold the pain still through fabric.

Dominic doesn't say sorry. Doesn't say that's not what I'm doing, doesn't defend the envelope, doesn't do any of the things a man does when he wants credit for listening. He just stands there with his hands loose at his sides and lets two full minutes go by in total silence, which I clock, because I have never once in eight years had a man let a silence like that sit without filling it with his own version of events.

Then he says, quiet, and there's something underneath it I haven't heard before, something careful: "Did he ever hit you."

"No." I say it fast, the way you answer a question you've answered before, for other people, in other rooms. "He never hit me. Not once. That was the whole — that was his whole thing, actually, that he never had to. He just narrated me instead." Simone's word, borrowed, sitting comfortably in my mouth now.

"Then why does your arm hurt in the cold."

I go very still.

I didn't think he'd noticed. I've been rubbing it all afternoon, some background static I thought was invisible, and he's clocked it the same way he clocks everything, filed it next to my rent and my mother's hydrangea, and now it's sitting on the table with the envelope, and there's no version of tonight where I get to keep it filed away.

"It's a scar," I say. "Old ones ache when it's cold. That's just — that's just bodies. That's just what bodies do."

"That's not what I asked."

I look at the envelope instead of at him. Easier.

"January," I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I mean it to, flatter than the story deserves, which is its own kind of protection. "Five years ago, almost six. We were arguing about something so stupid I don't even — I genuinely don't remember what it was about anymore, isn't that the worst part, you'd think you'd remember the thing that started it — and he picked up a picture frame off the shelf, one of the two of us at his cousin's wedding, and he threw it. Not at me. Past me, he'd say, if you asked him, he'd say past me, and technically the glass hit the wall behind my head first and then came down on my arm on the way to the floor, so technically he's right, he never touched me, the glass touched me, gravity touched me, he was just standing there when it happened." I laugh, once, a bad sound, nothing funny in it. "Fourteen stitches. I told the ER I fell reaching for something on a high shelf. They didn't ask a second question. Nobody ever asks a second question when the first story's plausible enough."

The kitchen is very quiet. The radiator ticks once, somewhere down the hall.

"Trevor Lang," I say, because it needs saying out loud in this house, in daylight, not through a car window on 195, not folded into a question about a job in Boston. "That's his name. Special Agent Trevor Lang. In case you want to keep it filed somewhere with everything else you keep filed on me."

He doesn't ask me to repeat it. Doesn't write anything down. He just holds it, the way he holds everything, and something in his jaw sets, and I watch the name land in this specific room for the first time and settle into the walls like smoke finding a crack.

"He still in Boston," Dominic says. Not really a question.

"As far as I know."

Silence again. Longer this time. I let it sit because it's my turn to make him fill it, and for once he doesn't rush to.

"I'm not going to be a set of hours in somebody's ledger again," I say, finally, and I hear how much steadier this comes out than anything else I've said today, because it's the one thing I actually rehearsed and meant every word of. "I don't care whose ledger. Yours, his, doesn't matter. If you want me in this house, in your life, whatever this is — you don't get to keep accounting for me from a distance and call it love. You have to give me something that costs you. Actually costs you. Not cash. Not an envelope. Something real."

I say it and I feel my own pulse in my throat, because I have never in my life named a price out loud to a man and waited for him to pay it. Usually I do the opposite. Usually I make the price small enough that nobody notices I've named one at all.

He looks at the envelope on the table for a long moment. Then he picks it up, and instead of pushing it toward me, he crosses the kitchen and puts it back in the drawer he took it from, and closes the drawer with the flat of his hand, the same hip-check motion I've seen him use on a different drawer in a different room, an old habit going somewhere quiet to be put away.

When he turns back around, his face has changed. Not softened, exactly. Opened, the way a door opens onto a room you didn't know was there.

"My mother," he says, "was killed in her kitchen. Not this one — the house I grew up in, two streets from here. Eleven November, nineteen ninety-seven. Twenty-seven years, this year, on the day. I was twelve. I was in the house when it happened."

He says it in six sentences, flat, evenly spaced, like a man reading measurements off a tape. No pause for effect. No waiting for my reaction. Just fact after fact, laid down one at a time, the way you'd hand someone tools.

My mouth is dry. I don't reach for water. "Who did it."

"A man who broke in." The sentence comes out smooth, worn at the edges, a stone that's been in someone's pocket for twenty-seven years, turned over so many times the surface has gone soft. I believe it instantly and completely, because there's no reason on God's earth not to, because grief makes everyone sound rehearsed eventually, because you say the true parts of a terrible thing so many times that they start to sound like something you memorized instead of something you lived.

"There's a Mass," he says. "St. Bartholomew's. Eleven November. For her. The family goes." He isn't looking at the drawer anymore, isn't looking at the envelope's ghost. He's looking at me, and for a second the weather-occupying thing drops entirely and there's just a man standing in his kitchen asking for something with his voice instead of his hands. "I want you there."

Eight days from now. I do the math without meaning to, the same way I count exits, uno, due — a church, his whole family, a dead woman I know nothing about except the shape of the hole she left in her son, a hole he's apparently decided to let me stand in front of, in public, next to him, where everyone can see exactly what I am to him and exactly what he's asking me to carry.

It is, I understand, sitting there with my arm still aching under my sleeve, the costly thing I asked for. He didn't hand me cash. He handed me his dead mother and eight days' notice and a pew.

"Yes," I say, before I let myself do the arithmetic on what it will cost me to stand there.