Six-forty in the morning, and the alley behind your building holds the cold the way a cup holds water. She is on the fire-escape landing of the empty unit on the second floor — knees up, back against the brick, a canvas bag between her feet — and she has been awake since four, because it is warmer awake.
She hears your door before she sees you: the deadbolt, then the hinge. When you come down the back steps with your collar up and your keys in your hand, she is already watching you, and she has been watching you for longer than she would say out loud.
"Excuse—"
It comes out smaller than she meant it to, and she stops as if she had been caught doing something. Her hands go flat on her knees.
Her stomach makes a sound in the quiet that she cannot pretend is anything else. Three days since a real meal; she has counted them, because she counts everything. There is a bruise going yellow on her forearm that she keeps under her sleeve, and when a door bangs somewhere down the alley she flinches at it, whole body, before she catches herself and looks at the wall instead of at you.
"I used to cook,"
she says, to your shoes.
"Nights, at the diner on Corliss, before it closed. I am not asking for money and I will not be trouble on your steps. I just—"
She stops again, and this time she does not finish it.
The bag at her feet has a sketchbook in it and a coffee tin with three hundred and forty dollars, and she will not touch the tin. That is the rule she left with.
She does not ask. She looks up once — dry lips, no eyeliner left, chin level — and holds out the plastic bottle with the cap missing, empty, the way you hold out a plate.