The house doesn't have a television. I noticed that the first week and never asked why, filed it next to the missing photographs, another door I don't open. Tonight there's a lamp on in the front room, yellow and low, and Dominic in the good chair with a stack of paper on his knee — a sanitation bid, the kind of document that comes stapled at the corner and smells like a copy machine — and a pair of reading glasses I have never once seen him wear.

Thin gold wire frames. They make him look like somebody's accountant instead of somebody's underboss, and I want, badly, to say something about it, and I don't, because I've learned by now which of his softnesses can survive being looked at directly and which ones close up the second you shine a light on them.

I sit on the floor by his chair instead. No invitation. I brought the hand cream from my bag — the drugstore kind, grapefruit and glycerine, the tube half-crushed from months of me squeezing it wrong from the middle — and I set it on the floorboards, and then I reach up and take his right hand off the arm of the chair without asking.

He goes still the way a building goes still in an earthquake — not calm, just braced, every joint locking at once, waiting to see if the thing keeps moving.

I keep moving.

His hand is heavier than it looks. Not the hand itself — the whole arm, like picking up something that's decided, on principle, not to help you. Four inches of burn tissue climb the back of it from the knuckles to the wrist, shiny in the lamp light, the kind of shine skin only gets when it's had to grow back without the parts that used to make it human — no hair follicles up that ridge, no pores, nothing sweating or breathing under there, just skin pulled tight as a drum head over whatever's underneath.

I squeeze a coin of cream into my palm and warm it between my hands the way you're supposed to, though I never do it for myself, I just slap it on cold and let my skin deal with it. For him I warm it first.

He hasn't pulled away. I keep waiting for the point where he will — some threshold I haven't located yet, some square inch of him that's finally too much — and it doesn't come. His jaw is tight enough that I can see the muscle working under the beard, but his hand stays open across my two palms like he's decided, somewhere below language, to let this happen to him.

"You don't have to let me do this," I say, working the cream in with both thumbs, small circles, the way I'd work paint into a stretched canvas that's gone stiff.

"I know."

"Okay."

I keep going. The scar tissue doesn't give the way normal skin gives — it moves as one piece, like there's a plate under there instead of layers, and I press harder than I would on myself, testing.

"Doesn't feel anything," he says, watching my hands instead of my face. "Not there. Not in the middle."

"The edges do." I move my thumbs off the shiny center and onto the border where the old skin meets the new, the seam of it, faint and rope-like. His breath changes there — not a sound, just a longer inhale, held a half-second too long before it lets go — and I stay exactly on that line and don't move off it, because apparently this is the one place on this man's body where a small thing can still land.

"2002," he says, into the lamp light, not to me exactly, more like reading it off the ceiling. "Seventeen. There was a car needed to disappear. I was told to burn it out past Warwick, in a lot behind a body shop that used to be there." He says told the way other men say asked, flat, no weight on it, like the difference doesn't interest him. "I didn't know gasoline vapor moves before the liquid does. Lit it standing too close. Whole thing went up faster than I expected it to."

I don't say anything. I've learned that with him silence is the thing that keeps a door open, and a question is usually the thing that shuts it.

"My father laughed," he says, and here the flatness cracks for exactly one syllable, just enough for me to hear what's underneath it, something old and still raw despite twenty-two years of scar tissue growing over the top of it. "Said I'd learn."

No name. He never says Salvatore, never says my father twice in a row like it's a person he's willing to keep in the room. He says it once and lets it sit there like a stone dropped in still water, and I watch the ripples go out and I don't ask him to say it again.

This is the first time his father has been a person in this house instead of a voice down a hallway asking about Fall River numbers. I clock it the way I clock everything now — not on purpose, just a habit my body's grown without permission, the same one that counts exits, the same one that notices when a car takes a wrong turn twice.

What he says: my father laughed. What he doesn't say: what year the laugh happened in, whether it was the same day or years later when the story had already calcified into something he could hand over whole, whether there was a hospital, a bandage, anybody's hand on his besides his own. He reports it the way he reported the frame of the murder to me two days ago — six flat sentences, evenly spaced, like a man reading measurements off a tape, a story worn smooth from being carried so long it's stopped being an event and started being an object, something you can hold up to the light without it cutting you anymore.

I keep working the cream into the seam at his wrist. My thumbs know this motion by now — I've done it enough times it doesn't need my eyes anymore, which frees them up to watch his face instead, the way his eyes have gone somewhere else in the room, somewhere that isn't the lamp or the bid document or me.

"My turn," I say, because it feels like the kind of night where a trade is owed, and because if I don't say something normal soon I'm going to say something that makes him put the wall back up. "Three clients gone since September. The cheese label people paused it, the brewery brought it in-house, the cider people are ninety days late on twenty-four hundred dollars they're never going to pay. I've got the bakery. Rita. Six hundred a month and cannoli." I keep my voice even, a ledger voice, information instead of appeal, because I learned nine chapters ago what happens the second I let this turn into asking. "Rent's covered till December if nothing breaks. After that I don't know."

He doesn't reach for the envelope drawer. Doesn't say a number, doesn't offer a name of somebody who could use a designer, doesn't do any of the things I've watched him do for me without asking — the bill, the client, the man in the stairwell. He just sits there with his hand still in mine, quiet, and I brace for the offer anyway, out of old habit, the same reflex that used to brace for Trevor's version of help, the kind that always came stapled to a lesson.

"What'd a good month used to look like," he says instead.

Not a fix. A question.

"Four grand, maybe five, when I had the studio splitting with Simone and two retainers going at once." I say it and hear how far away it sounds, a country I used to live in. "That was three years ago. Before everybody decided a cousin with Canva could do it for free."

"You still like it?"

It takes me a full second to understand the question, because nobody's asked it in eight years — not can you afford it, not when's the invoice going out, not why'd you bill it like that — just, plainly, whether the thing I do with my hands still gives me anything back.

"Yeah," I say, surprised at how true it comes out. "Even when it doesn't pay. I like watching something ugly get less ugly one layer at a time. I like — " I stop, because I've never said this part out loud to anyone, not even Simone. "I like that nobody can take the drawing back once it's good. They can stop paying me. They can't un-draw it."

He looks down at me then, actually down, the reading glasses slid a half inch off the bridge of his broken nose, and something in his face does the opening-door thing again, the thing that happened right before he told me about the kitchen in 1997, except smaller this time, a window instead of a door.

He gets up. My hands stay in the air a second, cupped around nothing, before I close them.

He comes back from the kitchen with a chipped white mug of espresso, made wrong — too much water, no crema, a shot he clearly pulled himself and clearly doesn't know he ruined — and a flat gold bar of Sicilian orange chocolate from the cupboard, the wrapper crackling as he sets it on the floor next to me without a word. He doesn't say here or I thought you might want this. He just puts the two things down like evidence in a case he isn't planning to argue, and sits back in the chair, and picks the bid document back up.

I eat the chocolate in small broken pieces. It tastes like orange peel and burnt sugar, and underneath the sugar there's something bitter that I decide, generously, is the point. The espresso is terrible and I drink it anyway, because it is warm and because he made it with his own hands, badly, on purpose or not I can't tell, and there is something about a man who cannot say a kind sentence but will ruin an espresso shot for you at nine at night that undoes something in my chest I'd rather keep tied down.

I lean my head against his leg. Just to rest it. His trousers smell like the house does now — orange peel, gun oil, the specific bitter of the coffee he just badly made — and underneath my cheek I can feel the small movement of him turning a page, and then another page, and then nothing, the paper going still on his knee.

I don't decide to fall asleep. It just happens the way sleep happens when your body finally believes, even for an hour, that nothing is coming through the door.

When I surface, the lamp is still on and the room has gone that particular late-house quiet where even the radiators have stopped arguing with themselves. My neck is stiff from the angle. The bid document is still on his knee, unread, hasn't moved in what feels like — I check, the ache in my own hip confirms it — an hour and a half, maybe more. His hand, the burned one, the one I worked cream into an hour ago, is resting on the back of my neck. Not gripping. Just resting there, weight without demand, warm from being where it's been.

I don't move. I let myself have another minute of this before I have to be a person who says things.

"You could just say something nice to me," I say finally, half into the fabric of his trouser leg, voice thick with sleep, not even sure I mean it as a real request so much as a thing that needed to be said out loud into the quiet, the way you say a prayer you don't expect answered.

A pause. Not the bracing kind. The considering kind.

"I know," he says.

That's all of it. No I'm not good at that. No excuse dressed up as an explanation, no promise to try harder starting Monday. Just two words, flat, true, an acknowledgment instead of an apology, and somehow — I turn this over as I sit there half-asleep against his leg, testing it for the sharp edges I'm used to finding in men's silences — somehow it's enough. Not enough forever. Enough for tonight, which is the only currency either of us is actually trading in.

He sets the document on the side table, finally, glasses folded on top of it. Then he's lifting me — not asking, just doing it, one arm under my knees and the other still faintly smelling of grapefruit and glycerine where it wraps behind my back — and I let my whole weight go into him because I'm too tired to perform not needing to be carried.

Eleven steps, I count without meaning to, my father's old habit surfacing even here, even now, uno, due — the front room to the bottom of the stairs, the stairs themselves, the short hall to the bedroom door standing open on its worn hinge. He doesn't stop counting his own steps or mine. He doesn't say anything at all. He just carries me the distance like it's the most unremarkable thing in the world, a man moving furniture, except his jaw is tight the whole way and his arm under my knees doesn't relax even once, and I understand, dimly, through the fog of being half-asleep, that this costs him something too — not the lifting, the letting-himself-be-seen-doing-it.

He sets me down on the near side of the bed, on top of the covers, doesn't bother pulling them back, just lies down next to me in his clothes with his boots still on, which he never does, and for a while neither of us moves.

I can smell my own hand cream on his skin — grapefruit and glycerine gone slightly waxy from body heat, mixed underneath with the orange peel and gun oil that's just him, always him, the register I could find in a dark room with my eyes shut and my nose alone — and I lie there in the dark listening to him breathe, and I know, the way you know a light is on in another room without opening your eyes, that he isn't asleep either.

Neither of us says so.

His hand, the burned one, comes to rest again — this time on the small of my back, over the shirt, not moving, not asking anything, just present, the scar tissue that doesn't feel anything at its center pressed flat against a part of me that feels everything, and I think, drifting somewhere just short of sleep, that this is the whole architecture of him laid bare in one gesture: the part of him that can't feel touching the part of me that can, and calling that closeness, and maybe — I decide this slowly, the thought arriving in pieces the way sleep arrives — maybe it actually is.

The clock in the hall ticks its patient tock through the wall. Somewhere outside a car passes and doesn't slow. I don't ask him what a good month looked like for him, seventeen and standing too close to gasoline vapor with his father's laugh still ringing in his ears twenty-two years later. He doesn't ask me anything else either.

We just lie there, both of us awake, both of us pretending otherwise, his hand warm and still against my back, my hand cream fading slowly into his ruined skin, and neither one of us says a single word more.