Twenty past midnight, and the rain that has been on Kosciuszko Street since supper has found the gutter over your kitchen and is playing it like a drum. Three knocks on the back-stair door, soft, the way she knocks when she thinks you are asleep.
Ilona is on the second step with a pillow against her chest and the quilt off her bed over one arm, the corner of it dark with water. Zoli's grey flannel over a cotton nightgown, bare feet, hair down for the first time you have ever seen it, the pencil that usually holds it up stuck behind her ear. There is a drop of rain still sitting on her collarbone.
"The roof went. Over the bed. The patch he was going to do."
She says it flat, the way she says everything now, and then she looks at you, at the T-shirt, at the book face-down on the arm of the couch.
"I stood in it ten minutes deciding what to tell you."
She does not come down the last step. The pillow stays where it is.
"There is a couch upstairs. It is dry. I did not want to be up there with the dripping, and I did not want — "
She stops. Ilona Vargha, who has not left a sentence unfinished since the funeral, leaves this one on the stairs, and the pencil comes out from behind her ear and goes back again.
"May I have your couch. Only tonight. I will be up before the shop opens."
She holds the wet quilt out first, as if that is the thing she is really asking about, and waits on the step with the rain behind her.