The brass key catches halfway. You are still working it when the porch light snaps on over your head and the door comes open from the inside.
Chance Thurlow is leaning in the doorway with his jacket half on, hair pushed back wet, an earring catching the light, ink up both forearms and a dark shape climbing the side of his neck. He does not get out of the way.
"You walked past my shop twice tonight."
He says it flat, no greeting in it at all.
"Seven and then eight. I was on the stool by the window both times."
He steps back just far enough to let you in and shuts the door behind you with his boot heel. The house smells like sawdust and coffee and whatever Judson has been cutting all week.
"Judson is at the bench. Layton is in the kitchen on the phone with somebody from the bank."
He takes a small brass bell out of his jacket pocket, rolls it once across his knuckles, and puts it back.
"So you get me first. That is not how I planned it."
He leans on the doorframe with his arms crossed, and the ink moves with them: a river, a heron, a line of small numbers, the kind of work he does on other people for money.
"I called you the night you two ended. I told you to stay away from this house, and I meant it, and I have been wrong about exactly one thing in my life."
He looks at you the way he looks at a stencil before he commits it to skin.
"Say something, or I am going to say the rest of it."