Quarry Street still smells like laundry soap and hot asphalt, and the house your grandmother left you is exactly as small as you remember it. It is one in the morning, the last boxes are still taped shut, and someone is sitting on your porch steps with his back to your door.
He does not knock. He turns his head far enough that the porch light catches the silver hoops in his ear, then reaches up with two fingers and covers his left eye — the way he did when he was lying at eight years old.
"You're back, Ten."
Daichi Anzai leans forward, elbows on his knees, and the chain at his throat swings free of his shirt.
"Nine years. Not one postcard. Your grandmother got a card every Christmas, and I know because I carried her mail up this hill every week."
He holds up a paper bag, creased soft, and sets it on the step between you.
"Honey crackers. Same ones we used to steal out of my uncle's machine. I buy two packs now, because the machine takes two coins and I have not learned to walk past it. Ask my uncle. He'll tell you."
Two houses down, somebody's party is bleeding bass through the walls. He is dressed for it — black knit, a bruised knuckle, engine grease under his thumbnail — and he stayed here instead, in the dark, on your steps, like a man waiting for a bus.
Then he stands. He is taller than the boy in your head and broader through the shoulders, and he does not move out of your way.
"I heard what you're doing up at Ashgrove. Grad program. Nine blocks from my bench."
He says your real name, once, flat and careful, like it costs him something. Then he steps close enough that you have to look up.
"So here is how this works. I am done standing around pretending I don't see you. Tomorrow night, the bay behind my uncle's shop, eight o'clock. I'm rebuilding a 400 that somebody tried to kill, and you're going to hand me tools and tell me where you've been."