The morning I don't go to the cafe feels different from the morning I didn't go yesterday, and it takes me an hour to figure out why: yesterday not going was obedience. Today it's a decision, mine, made on purpose, and there's a version of me that wants credit for that distinction even though nobody's keeping score except me.

I go to Mr. Pariseau's door first, before I can talk myself into spending the whole envelope on something softer than rent.

He answers in a cardigan that smells like his radiator smells — dust burning off metal — and counts the bills twice in front of me with his lips moving, which used to humiliate me and now just feels like weather.

"September," he says, like he's confirming a fact rather than accepting cash.

"September," I agree, and watch two hundred and fifty of somebody else's dollars disappear into a coffee can he keeps under the register for exactly this purpose, and I feel two things at once standing in his doorway — filthy, because I know exactly whose money this is and what it bought before it bought my rent, and solvent, actually solvent, for the first time in three months, and the second feeling wins by enough that I hate myself only a normal amount on the walk back upstairs.

Eleven hundred and fifty dollars left. I fold it into a plain envelope, no note, because I already know what I'm going to say and it isn't going to fit on paper.

The tape is the easy part. I find a roll of black electrical tape in the kitchen drawer under a dead flashlight battery and a church key, and I put a two-inch strip over my laptop camera without really examining why, except that it's the first physical thing I've done to protect myself from anything in longer than I want to count, and it feels less like paranoia than like flossing — a small, cheap, correct habit I should have started years ago.

The phone is harder because it costs money I don't have anymore, having just given most of what I did have to Mr. Pariseau's coffee can.

The kid behind the counter at the repair shop on Broadway has a septum ring and a name tag that says DEAN and the patience of a much older man. He turns my phone over twice, notes the crack in the corner I've been ignoring since spring, and says factory reset is sixty dollars, cash or card, and I hear myself say cash before I've checked what's actually in my wallet, because credit leaves a trail and I have decided, apparently, as of about eleven this morning, that I am a person who thinks about trails now.

"You gonna lose your photos," Dean says, not unkindly. "Everything. You want a backup first?"

I think about four years of photos on that phone. Trevor's arm in half of them, cropped or not cropped. A few of my father, from before, transferred phone to phone to phone like a running wound I kept refusing to let scab.

"No," I say. "Wipe it."

He shrugs, the shrug of a boy who has never once in his life had to erase himself to feel safe, and thirty minutes later I walk out sixty dollars poorer and holding a phone that knows nothing about me, which is the closest thing to clean I've felt all week.

At 6:05 I'm standing across Atwells Avenue watching Gennaro flip the sign in the window from OPEN to the hand-lettered CHIUSO he's used since before I was born, probably, and he sees me through the glass the way you see weather coming — with resignation, not surprise.

He doesn't wave me over. He finishes wiping down the counter, hangs the rag on the hook by the register, and comes to the door and unlocks it without a word, and then he does the thing that tells me more than anything he could have said: he walks past me, out onto the sidewalk, going home, leaving the door standing open behind him like a held breath.

That's the verdict. He's not going to stop me and he's not going to bless it either. He's just going to let it happen where he can't see it, the way he's apparently been doing since March.

Inside, the grinder is back together on the counter — somebody fixed it, or gave up fixing it and just reassembled the pieces to look less like an accusation — and Dominic is at Gennaro's little office table behind the counter in his shirtsleeves, tie already gone, top button undone, going through a ledger that is absolutely none of his business, a pencil behind one ear that doesn't belong to him.

He doesn't look up when the bell over the door goes.

I put the envelope down on the marble counter, hard enough that it makes a flat slap, and the sound finally gets his eyes off the ledger.

"I used the rest for rent," I say. "Eleven-fifty's in there. I'm not apologizing for that."

He looks at the envelope, then at me, and something moves under his face that isn't quite a smile.

"The invoice is paid," he says.

"I know. I'm giving back what was left over."

"No." He sets the pencil down, deliberate, like he's setting down a weapon. "The invoice is paid. Your Cranston client wired fourteen hundred dollars to your business account this morning."

The floor doesn't move but my stomach does, that elevator-cable drop, fast and clean.

"That's not possible. He's been out of office since June."

"People come back into offices," Dominic says, "when someone explains to them what it costs to stay out."

I stand there with my hand still flat on the marble, feeling the cold of it climb up through my palm, and I do the math out loud in my head — he called somebody, or had somebody call somebody, on my behalf, about my money, without asking me — and I wait to feel the rage that should be the correct response to a man managing my finances like I'm a business he's acquired.

What I feel instead, God help me, is wet.

I catalogue this honestly, because lying to myself has never once worked out for me: I am furious, genuinely, somewhere in the back of my skull where the reasonable woman lives. And under that, closer to the surface, I am something else entirely, and I don't get to pretend the second thing is smaller than the first just because it's more embarrassing.

"You had no right," I say, mostly to see if I can still say true things out loud.

"No," he agrees. "I didn't."

He doesn't apologize for that either. He picks the pencil back up, and I watch him not look at me for four more seconds, and then he stands, and walks toward the back, toward the storeroom, and I follow him because some part of me has been walking toward that room since the second I woke up this morning and started deciding things.

The bulb's still bare. The scale's still bolted to the bench with its dried coffee ring. The shelving holds its rows of tomato tins in the same order they held them two nights ago, and the room smells the way it smelled then — scorched milk, cold concrete, something underneath it that might be him or might just be the building.

He doesn't touch me. I don't touch him. We stand in that room for what feels like four pages of not touching, him with his back half to me at the workbench, me by the shelving with one hand flat against a cold tin can just to have something solid under my palm, and the silence stretches out long enough that I can hear the compressor in the front room click on and off once.

"I need to ask you something," I say, "and I need you to answer it like a person, not like whatever you were doing with that ledger."

He turns. "Ask it."

"Do you want me here. Or do you just want to know where I am."

He doesn't answer right away, and I respect that more than I'd respect a fast answer, because a fast answer would have been a lie dressed up as tenderness.

"The second," he says.

I feel that land somewhere under my ribs, cold and clean, and I make myself not flinch from it, because flinching is the thing he told me two days ago that scared him about people who don't do it.

"Okay," I say. "Then I'm going to go—"

"I'm not sure the two are different," he says, cutting through it, "in me."

Silence again. My tongue finds the healing ridge inside my lower lip, worries it, the old 2019 scar tissue that lives there under the fresh split, and I think: at least he's not lying to make this easier. At least he's handing me the whole ugly shape of it instead of a nicer one.

"Thursday shouldn't have happened," he says, before I can answer that. "The way it happened. I'm not going to apologize for it."

"Why not."

"Because apologizing," he says, "is a way of telling you I wouldn't do it again. And I would."

"I know," I say. "That's why I came back."

Something crosses his face that I don't have a word for yet — not surprise, not relief, something between the two that doesn't sit easily on a man his size — and I cross the four feet of concrete between us before either of us can decide it's a bad idea.

I take his right hand.

He goes rigid the second my thumb finds the scar, the shiny raised tissue climbing from his knuckles to his wrist, four inches of something that happened to him once and never stopped happening, and I run my thumb along it slow, memorizing the topography of it the way I'd memorize a brush I trusted.

"How old were you," I ask.

"I wasn't a child," he says, which isn't an answer, which is the loudest non-answer I've ever heard, and I let it sit there unanswered because some doors you don't kick, you just note that they're locked and keep walking the hallway.

What happens next is slow in a way Thursday wasn't, and it's slow because I make it slow, because my hands are the ones doing the deciding this time and I want to feel every second of that being true.

I get his shirt open button by button, feeling the give of old cotton under my fingers, the heat coming off his chest before I even touch skin. I put my mouth against the ruined hand first, against the scar itself, lips on the shiny tissue, and I feel him go still all the way down, a stillness that isn't control, it's the opposite of control, it's a man who has forgotten how to perform anything.

The crate's wood is rough under my knees when I climb onto it, splinters I'll find later and pick out of my palm in the mirror at home, and he sits back against the shelving edge to take my weight, hands finally moving, one at my hip where the four fingermarks from Thursday are still going from red to something deeper, the other sliding up under my shirt to find the raw scrape along my spine, and he touches it like it's something he's sorry for without saying sorry, a slow careful drag of his thumb along the edge of it that makes gooseflesh break out along the inside of my left elbow first, the way it always does, before the right catches up.

I keep my eyes open. It costs me something — there's a whole animal instinct in me that wants to close them, wants to go somewhere private inside my own skull the way I used to during four years of a very different kind of proximity — but I fight it, because I need to see this happening, need to watch him watching me, and at some point I put my hand flat against his jaw and make him keep his eyes open too, and he does, grey-green and unguarded in a way I've never once seen them in the front room of this cafe.

Neither of us says anything. There's a rhythm the crate makes against the concrete, a small percussive complaint, and the tomato tins on the shelf beside us shiver faintly with it, and somewhere in the middle of it my toes curl so hard against the inside of my shoes that they'll ache tomorrow, and I let that happen too, let all of it happen in the open instead of hiding it the way four years taught me to hide everything that might be used against me later.

He doesn't say my name. Not once. I notice the absence of it the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue — an insistence, a return, over and over, to the gap.

After, he slides down the shelving until he's sitting on the concrete, back against the steel uprights, knees up, and it's the most unguarded I've ever seen a body take up space — this enormous man folded down onto a cold floor like something poured out rather than placed.

I sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder, both of us breathing.

"Since March," he says, to the middle distance, not to me exactly. "Every day. Six months in that cafe, at that table, back to the wall." He turns the burned hand over in his lap, studying it like it belongs to someone else. "Waiting for something. You're the only thing that ever changed in that room."

"Waiting for what."

"A man."

"Which man."

He gets up. It's not fast, it's not violent, it's just final, the conversation folding itself shut the way Gennaro folds his apron, and he reaches down and offers me his good hand to help me off the floor, and when I take it he doesn't let go right away.

"I want your Sundays," he says.

I laugh, because it's the strangest sentence anyone's ever said to me in a storeroom smelling of scorched milk. "My what?"

"You're not at the cafe on Sundays. I've never once been able to account for where you are on a Sunday, and it—" He stops, like the sentence is costing him something he didn't budget for. "It keeps me up."

"That's not romantic," I say. "That's surveillance with better manners."

"I didn't say it was romantic."

I look at him a long moment, this man who won't apologize and won't say my name and has just handed me, without meaning to, the single most honest thing he's said all week.

"Tomorrow," I say. "Yes."

Outside, the September evening's gone the particular deep blue Atwells Avenue gets right before the streetlights commit to being on, and I'm three steps past the cafe's front window when I stop dead, because past the mouth of the alley beside the Bellini — the same alley I came out of two nights ago with my back scraped raw and my lip already split — there's a car sitting in the loading bay behind the building, sixty feet off, engine dead, no one inside it.

Grey. The grey.

I cross the street without deciding to, feet moving faster than the sense in my head is moving, and I get close enough this time — closer than I've ever been, closer than the headlights that always snapped on the second I got near — to see that the doors are unlocked, that there's nobody hiding low in the seat, that whoever left it here left it in a hurry or left it on purpose, and hanging from the rearview mirror, swinging faintly in whatever wind's coming down the alley, is a small laminated parking permit.

I'm close enough now to read it.