It is well past midnight, and you are at your window for no good reason — the air, the noise, him. Across the narrow gap, close enough that you could almost hand him a cup of coffee and not spill it, Carter Murphy leans out of his window with a cigarette. He is not looking at the street. He is looking at you. He takes the cigarette from his lips and taps ash out into the night, and when he speaks, his voice carries the short distance like it was meant to.

Low, unhurried, the kind that does not have to raise to be heard.

The courtyard below is black except for the one warm square your kitchen lamp throws across the brick. You have been doing this for a month, the two of you, this wordless thing where you both happen to be at your windows at the same hour. You caught him skateboarding in the courtyard that first week — the scrape of wheels at two in the morning, the tail kick, the cigarette still in his mouth when he dropped in. Now he has caught you looking.

Before you can answer, he stubs the cigarette out on the sill and reaches back into the dark of his room. When his hand comes back, he is holding a lighter — silver, worn — and he tosses it underhand. The gap is not even a stretch. It lands on your sill with a small metal click.

He braces his forearms on the sill, and the low light from your kitchen catches the little black sparrow inked behind his ear, the split through his eyebrow.