4:40 a.m. and the pipes are talking again.

Not the September version of talking, the low occasional creak I've gotten used to. This is January talking, mid-winter fury, the boiler down in Mr. Pariseau's basement clearing its throat like it's been personally offended by the temperature. Somewhere between midnight and now the sky decided to drop eighteen degrees and my radiator, ancient, cast-iron, painted over so many times it's lost its ridges, is banging like somebody's taking a wrench to it from the inside.

I lie on the mattress with my hands tucked under my armpits, too warm from being pressed against my own body, and the rest of me cold enough that my knees have found each other and locked. Seven, I think, before I mean to think it. Seven days since the storeroom. I don't know why that number keeps arriving first, ahead of what day it is or what I'm supposed to do today, but it does, every morning, the way some people wake up already knowing the date.

I don't get up for another forty minutes. I lie there listening to the radiator argue with itself and doing the thing I do now instead of sleeping, which is running my thumb along the healing scrape on my knuckle — Sunday's souvenir — back and forth, back and forth, a worry stone made of my own skin.

—

The winter box is at my mother's. Sweaters, the good wool socks, the puffer coat that makes me look like a duffel bag but actually keeps the wind out — all of it in a taped Rubbermaid tub in Carmela's basement in Cranston, because in June it seemed insane to keep bulky things I wasn't using in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen.

I am not calling my mother.

Calling my mother means the conversation from a week ago, minus the audience, plus whatever new intelligence she's gathered since — plus, almost certainly, another update on Trevor Lang's health, career, or marital availability, delivered like a weather report she assumes I want. I would rather be cold.

So I put on a cardigan — grey, thin, more decorative than functional — over a summer dress with cap sleeves, and I look at myself in the cracked half-mirror over the sink and I look like exactly what I am, which is a woman dressing for August in a room that has already moved into November.

—

Gennaro has the heat on.

I feel it before I see it, stepping through the Bellini's door — a wall of dry warmth with an edge of something burnt underneath it, and Gennaro, seventy-four, bald, mustache trimmed to a soldier's precision, looks up from behind the counter and says, without preamble, "First time since March. Smells like something's on fire. It's just dust." He says this the way other people say good morning.

He sets my cortado at the second table from the window before I've sat down all the way, sliding it across the marble so it doesn't spill, and he doesn't look toward the back of the room, doesn't so much as flick his eyes there, which is its own kind of announcement.

I don't need him to look. I already know.

—

Dominic is at his table, back to the wall, and he is not alone. Bruno's there, nearest the door as always, two of everything sweet in front of him — today it's sfogliatelle, flaking onto a napkin he's tucked into his collar like a bib, entirely unbothered by his own enormity in a small chair. Two other men I don't know sit closer to Dominic, and I make myself not learn their faces. That's a rule I invented for myself around day three: don't collect the ones who aren't collecting you.

Dominic himself I can't help cataloguing. It's a compulsion at this point, an inventory I run without asking permission from the rest of me. His hands are flat on the table, both of them, the burned one and the whole one, the four inches of shiny scar tissue catching the window light in a way that makes it look wet even though it's been dry for however many years it's been dry. The steel watch on his wrist, no glint to it, matte and functional. He is listening to whichever of the two men is talking, and his face gives away exactly nothing, the same ledger-flat attention I imagine he gives contracts, corpses, me.

He has not spoken more than eleven words to me since Saturday. I know because I counted, because apparently I've become someone who counts words the way I used to count exits — tomorrow, and Sundays, then, and go home, it's late on Tuesday when I lingered near the counter too long, and that's it, that's the whole ledger of four days.

I have a sentence prepared. I have had it prepared since Monday, turning it over in my head at two in the morning, in the shower, walking to client meetings that don't exist anymore. I need to know if this is a thing or an accident. Eleven words for his eleven words, symmetrical, adult, the kind of sentence a woman says who has read a self-help book about attachment styles.

I do not say it.

What I do instead is take one sip of the cortado, make a face like I've bitten a lemon, and say, loud enough to carry, "Gennaro — this is scorched. The milk's scorched."

It isn't. It's fine. It's better than fine, it's the same cortado he's made me for sixteen months, but I need noise in this room and I don't have the elevenword sentence yet, so scorched milk will have to do.

Gennaro looks at me over his glasses with an expression that says he has poured coffee for three generations of a family that terrifies grown men and he is not going to dignify a lie about milk temperature. He says nothing. He goes back to wiping the same six inches of counter he's been wiping since I walked in.

—

Bruno finishes his second pastry, wipes his mouth, says something to Dominic I don't catch and don't try to, and heaves himself up with the particular grace of a heavy man who has made peace with gravity. The two other men go with him. The door does its little bell-jingle thing, twice, and then it's just Gennaro, me, and Dominic, and the broken grinder sitting reassembled by the register, still throwing its burr every fourth pull since March.

Dominic stands.

He doesn't come to my table. He goes to the counter, steps behind it — a liberty I have never seen anyone else take with Gennaro's domain, not even Bruno — and starts remaking my cortado on the machine himself.

He is bad at it. He doesn't know the machine, doesn't know that you have to hold the portafilter at an angle for the first two seconds or it floods, and the milk comes out too hot, over-textured, more foam than silk, because the grinder throws its burr on every fourth pull and nobody's fixed it and he clearly doesn't know that either. He sets the cup down in front of me without a word, the foam already collapsing at the edges, and goes back to his table.

I look at the cup. I look at his back.

The absurdity of it — a man who controls, by report, half of Federal Hill's sanitation contracts, standing at a dead woman's espresso machine because I complained about milk temperature — nearly cracks something open in my chest that isn't anger, and I hate that it isn't anger, so I stand up and carry the terrible cortado over to his table like I've been summoned, though I haven't been.

"Are we going to talk," I say, "or are you going to keep making me bad coffee as a personality."

He doesn't look up right away. When he does, it's slow, unhurried, the grey-green of his eyes catching the window light the same way the scar does.

"Sit down," he says.

"I don't want to sit down. I want to know if Saturday was — " I stop myself before housekeeping, before any of the ugly words I've been saving up, and start again, plainer. "Are you going to touch me again, or was that the last of it?"

"Touch you," he repeats, like he's tasting the phrase for defects.

"You know what I mean."

"I know what you said. I don't know what you mean." He leans back, arms loose, unthreatened, a man who has had this exact conversation with worse people than me and lived. "Is this a thing you want a name for?"

"I want a word. Any word. You could say girlfriend. You could say affair. You could say sorry, even, God forbid, an actual apology with the actual word in it—"

"I told you already. Apologizing tells you I wouldn't do it again."

"That was Saturday. This is Thursday. Things can change in five days."

"Not that."

The heat's still coming up under the floor, the radiator smell of scorched dust everywhere, and I can feel my palms going damp against the sides of the terrible cup, my whole body running a temperature I don't want.

"You've been sitting here," I say, and something in my own voice surprises me, comes out lower and steadier than I meant it, "since March. Six months and two weeks, in the same chair, back to the wall, waiting for a man you won't name. That's not business, Dominic. Business doesn't take six months and two weeks. That's waiting for something the way people wait for weather to break, or for someone to die."

I watch it land.

It's small — I would have missed it a week ago, before I started reading him the way I used to read Trevor's silences for the size of the storm coming — but it's there: a flicker behind the eyes, a half-second recalibration, like I've moved a chess piece he hadn't accounted for. He doesn't answer right away, and the not-answering is its own kind of answer.

It is, I understand with a small cold thrill, the first time I have ever seen him have to think.

I don't get to enjoy it.

"Your Cranston client," he says, "the one who owed you fourteen hundred. He stopped answering in August because his wife found out he was skimming from a joint account to pay a woman in Fall River. That's not why he stopped paying you. He stopped paying you because he was scared, generally, of everyone, all at once. Your rent is two-fifty a month, which for that apartment means your landlord likes you or forgot to raise it, and I'd guess forgot, because Pariseau doesn't like anyone. Your mother's on a street off Reservoir Avenue in Cranston with a hydrangea bush she overwaters."

He says it the way he'd read a weather report. No relish in it. No performance.

"You've been doing math on me," I say, and my voice comes out thinner than I want it to.

"Since before Thursday."

"Before the storeroom."

"Before you knew my name."

The room's too warm suddenly, the scorched-dust smell thick in my throat, and I can feel my hands, both of them, running hot around the cup while the rest of me — my feet, still in sandals because I own exactly one pair of boots and they're also in Cranston — stays cold enough that my toes have curled up tight against the sandal soles without my permission. I am furious and I am, God help me, aware of him the way you're aware of a held breath, the kind of aware that has nothing to do with safety.

I stand.

"I came here to say something," I tell him, "and instead you turned it into an audit."

"You didn't say the thing you came to say."

"No," I agree. "I didn't."

I'm three steps toward the door, cardigan doing nothing against a chill that isn't really about the weather anymore, when he says it — not raising his voice, not needing to, because the room is empty enough now that it carries on its own.

"The unit you pulled out of your wheel well Sunday."

I stop.

"Magnet mount," he says. "Blue tape."

The floor doesn't tilt this time. It just goes very, very still, the way a room does right before you understand you've been standing in the wrong version of it the whole time.

"Who put it there," he says. Flat. Not a guess. A fact he's already holding, turned toward me like he turned my label comp toward himself ten days ago, waiting to see what I'll do with it now that it's on the table between us.

I don't turn around.

"How do you know that," I say, to the door, to the bell that hasn't rung yet, to anything that isn't his face.

He doesn't answer that either. He lets the silence do what his silences always do, which is get heavier the longer they run, until I understand he isn't going to say anything else, that the question was never a question at all, it was a demonstration — of how long he's been watching my hands, my knees on the pavement, the fear on me on a Sunday morning I thought belonged only to me and Simone's unanswered call.

Four days. He's known for four days and said nothing, watched me carry it around like it was mine to carry alone.

I don't answer him.

I push the door open into a cold that has no business being September, and the bell jingles once, cheap and bright, and behind me I hear nothing — no chair scraping back, no footsteps, nothing — because he already knows I'm not going to turn around, and I understand, walking fast down Atwells Avenue with my hands burning and my feet frozen and eleven words still unsaid in my mouth, that I have spent a week thinking I was the one doing the watching.