The window sash in my kitchen has ice on the inside by six, which tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Pariseau's opinion of storm windows, and I'm running a butter knife along the frost line trying to keep it from soaking into the wood when someone knocks.

Not Bruno's two-honk signal from the curb. A knock. Human knuckles, three of them, close together, at my actual door.

I stand there with the knife still in my hand for one full second doing the math, because in ten weeks — since the Monday he crossed a cafe floor and told me my label design was a lie — this has happened exactly once before, back in October. He sends the Lincoln. He sends Bruno with a garment bag or a grocery bag or nothing at all except the fact of himself behind the wheel, idling at the curb like weather you can see coming. He does not stand on my landing in the cold and knock like a man selling something.

I open the door and he fills it. Coat still buttoned, breath fogging, a paper bag from the corner store hanging off two fingers like he forgot he was holding it.

"Hey," he says, which is not a word I've heard him use before, and steps past me into the kitchen without waiting for an invitation, the way he does everything.

He takes his shoes off.

I don't know why that's the detail that gets me instead of any of the others — the coat, the bag, the knock — but he toes them off by the mat like a man who's been coming here for years, socked feet on my cold linoleum, and doesn't say a single word about the tub sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor next to the stove, or the mattress on the floor in the next room with no frame under it, or the plants crowding every windowsill and half the counter, green against the black glass.

I, on the other hand, cannot stop talking about it.

"So the third radiator doesn't work at all, that's not even a bang-and-then-heat situation, it's just cold metal that Pariseau swears he's ordering a part for, he's been ordering that part since March, and the one in the bathroom — well, there's no bathroom, that's the tub right there, next to the stove, which I know looks insane, but the building's from like 1920-something and I guess whoever plumbed it just decided the kitchen made sense—"

"Maya."

"—and the window ices on the inside, which I've started thinking of as free art, honestly, if you squint it looks like—"

"Maya."

I stop. He's still holding the paper bag. He sets it on the counter next to my mason jar of change — the one with the Canadian penny I've kept for two years for no reason I can name — and looks at the tub like it's a piece of furniture he's deciding whether to buy.

"Does it work," he says.

"The tub? Yeah. It's just — it's a tub. In a kitchen."

"Then run it."

He says it the way he says everything, flat, like the sentence already happened and he's just telling me about it after the fact, and he pulls one of my two mismatched kitchen chairs away from the table, turns it to face the tub, and sits down in his coat like he's planning to watch a movie.

I stare at him.

"You want to watch me take a bath."

"I want to sit in a chair," he says. "You can do what you want in the tub."

There is nothing to say to that. So I turn both taps and the pipes do the thing they always do, a shudder that runs the length of the building like it's personally offended, and the window over the sink starts fogging from the outside edges in while he sits there with his coat still buttoned and his hands loose on his knees, watching steam climb the glass and turn my houseplants into green smudges.

I strip with my back half to him because ten weeks of this hasn't taught my body to stop being embarrassed about the width of my own hips in a kitchen that isn't warm enough for standing around naked in, and I get in before I've tested it properly, which is a mistake I make every single time because I never learn.

It's too hot. Scalding-too-hot, the kind that goes past pain into something closer to a held note, and I go red from my ankles to my collarbone in about four seconds flat, a flush I can feel climbing my own skin like something being poured.

I don't ask him to fix it.

That's the part I catch myself doing, the old reflex, four years deep and buried under three more on top of that — you don't ask, you adjust yourself to the water, you make your body smaller and quieter and grateful for what it's given, because asking costs more than sitting still and burning does. I bite down on it. I sit there going pink and say nothing.

He gets up without a word and turns the cold tap himself, just enough, testing the water with two fingers of his left hand, and when it levels out he sits back down in the chair and doesn't say anything about the fact that I didn't ask.

I make a small sound anyway. Relief, mostly. Something in my chest unclenching that I didn't know was clenched.

"Better," I say, which is as close as I can get to thank you without it sounding like I'm apologizing for needing the water fixed in the first place.

"Yeah," he says.

He comes around behind me a few minutes later, kneels on the cold linoleum without rolling his pant legs, which means he's going to ruin the knees of a suit that probably cost more than my car, and picks up the bottle of grapefruit shampoo sitting on the tub's rim like he's done this every day of his life instead of never.

His hands are careful in a way his hands are almost never careful. He wets my hair first, cupping water at the back of my skull, and I feel the difference immediately between his left hand and his right — the left moves the way a hand moves, fingers spreading and closing, and the right stays flatter, more deliberate, like he's steering it rather than feeling with it. He keeps that one mostly out of the water. Rests it on the tub's cold enamel rim between passes instead of dipping it in with the rest.

I watch the four inches of shiny scar tissue on the back of it in the low kitchen light, water running off his wrist in threads, and I think about the story he already gave me — seventeen, a car that needed to disappear, a father who laughed — and I think about how careful he's being with the exact part of himself that's supposed to already be numb.

"Does it hurt," I ask. "In the water. Hot water."

He works shampoo into my scalp, thumbs moving in slow circles behind my ears, and takes long enough to answer that I think he isn't going to.

"Not anymore," he says. "Not in the water."

That's it. That's the whole answer, five words, and I feel the shape of everything he isn't saying sitting right behind it — not anymore implies a time when it did, in the water implies a specific memory he's not handing me, some version of seventeen-years-old standing under a shower trying to get the smell of gasoline off skin that had already stopped feeling anything where it mattered. I want to ask what year that stopped hurting. I want to ask what he did instead of asking for help. I don't. I let it sit there between us the way I've learned to let things sit, and he tips my head back gently with two fingers under my chin to rinse the suds down, water running warm past my ears, and neither of us says another word about it.

The window's fully fogged now, black glass gone opaque and grey, my plants reduced to shapes I recognize only because I know where I put them.

"Monday," I say instead, because I need somewhere to put my mouth that isn't his hand. "Father Piras. Did you notice his shoes?"

Dominic's hands still for half a second in my hair. "His shoes."

"Orthopaedic. The Velcro kind. Seventy-nine years old, holding a chalice with his hands shaking that hard, and he's wearing shoes like my grandmother used to wear to church." I don't know why I'm telling him this. Maybe because it's the only piece of Monday small enough to say out loud without it costing something. "And Gennaro — he was crying, in the back, and he kept doing this thing where he'd wipe his nose like it was allergies. In November. In a stone church with no pollen in it anywhere."

"He does that every year," Dominic says. Quiet. Rinsing again, water down my spine now, warm going toward cool as it reaches the small of my back. "Says it's his sinuses every year."

"Nobody believes him."

"No," he says. "Nobody does."

I keep going because the silence after that feels like it wants filling and I haven't learned yet, not fully, that it doesn't. "The photo, on the memorial card. She's thirty-four in it forever. That's — she's been dead twenty-seven years and she's still thirty-four. That yellow dress." I feel him behind me, still, very still, water dripping off his working hand into the tub in single drops I can hear. "I keep doing the math without meaning to. She was three years older than I am right now, when it happened."

"Her hands were small," Dominic says.

That's all. Four words, offered into the fogged air of my kitchen like he's setting something down on a table he doesn't trust to hold weight, and then nothing else. No sentence after it, no story, no year, no room. Small hands. That's the whole inheritance he hands me and then closes his mouth around, jaw doing the thing I've watched it do at three different dinners and once in a church two days ago.

I don't ask what came after small.

I sit there in cooling water with my own hands folded over my knees and I let the silence be a silence instead of a hole I have to fill, and something in my chest recognizes this as new — not the silence, the letting it be one — recognizes it the way you notice you've stopped biting your cheek halfway through a hard conversation and only clock it after the fact.

The water's gone properly tepid by the time either of us moves again.

He lifts me out without asking, one arm under my knees and the other flat and warm along my spine, and wraps me in the towel hanging off the oven door — the good one, my one good towel, which has never in its life been big enough for the job and isn't now, covering me collarbone to mid-thigh and nothing else. He notices. Takes his own coat off the chair back where he'd hung it and puts it around me on top of the towel instead, and the coat is heavier than any towel has ever been, wool gone soft at the collar, and it smells like him — gun oil under everything, the bitter ghost of espresso he's had three cups of today, orange peel from whatever he ate on the way here — and I stand in my own kitchen wrapped in it like a person being handed something precious by accident.

He carries me the eight feet from tub to mattress like it's nothing, like I weigh what a coat weighs, and sets me down on sheets that have gone cold in the November evening, and I pull him down after me before he can decide to sit in another chair.

He undresses slower than usual. No wire check tonight, no clinical hands moving over seams — just his shirt coming off over his head, the burn scar catching lamp light along the wrist, and then his weight coming down over me careful, like he's still checking something's load-bearing before he trusts it.

"You're freezing," he says, palm flat against my thigh where the towel's slipped.

"You made me get out."

"The water went cold."

"You're the one who added the cold water."

"You were burning," he says, like that settles it, and then he's kissing me before I can argue further, unhurried in a way the storeroom never was and the first night in his bed almost was, his mouth moving down my throat slow enough that I feel every separate place his mouth stops — the hollow at my collarbone, the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, the two-inch scar on my forearm that he finds with his lips like he's been mapping it since September and never told me.

His right hand stays at my hip the whole time, weight without pressure, the burn tissue faintly rough against skin that's gone hot again for an entirely different reason than the bathwater. When he finally moves inside me it's slow, deliberate, the same careful economy he used washing my hair, like tenderness for him is a thing built out of small controlled motions rather than any word he'd ever say out loud, and I hold onto his shoulders and let my mouth open against his jaw and don't try to name what's happening because naming it would make it something that could be taken back.

Afterward he doesn't move off me right away. Stays there with his forehead against my temple, breathing slowing down against my ear, one hand still flat on my hip like he's holding something in place that might otherwise drift.

When he finally does roll to the side I follow him, curl into the space his arm makes, and put my palm flat against his sternum without deciding to.

I feel his heartbeat under my hand. Steady, slower than I expect, and I press just enough to keep the beat clear and count it the way you'd check a door twice after you've already locked it once — one, two, three, a habit with no name that I've apparently started keeping — and he lets me. Doesn't ask what I'm doing. Lies there with his eyes open on the ceiling, on the water stain up there he's never once mentioned, and lets my hand stay where it is like it's not strange at all for someone to lie in the dark counting the proof that he's still here.

The radiator bangs once, then again a few minutes later, the third one still cold and useless in the bathroom that isn't a bathroom, and the window over the sink is still fogged solid, black glass gone soft grey, my forty-one plants reduced to shapes behind it that I know by heart even without seeing them clearly.

At two in the morning he's still here.

Not gone to check a phone. Not up and dressed and gone into the cold to be somewhere the family needs him to be. Just here, on a mattress with no frame, in an apartment with ice on the inside of the glass, his chest rising slow under my hand and his breath finally gone even with sleep, the first night in ten weeks that he has stayed anywhere that belongs to me instead of the other way around.

I don't move my hand. I don't check the time again. I lie there with the radiator ticking its cold complaint into the dark and let myself have this — steam still ghosted on black glass, his heartbeat under my palm, nothing asked of me and nothing promised back — for as long as it lasts, which tonight, for once, is the whole night through.