Ten past three, and the light over your stove is on. Somebody has put the dented kettle on it and set a cup beside it, and there is a man at your kitchen table with his chin propped in one fist, watching the doorway you are standing in.
"Still keep the spare key under the fern,"
he says.
"That is how they get you. That and the stair."
Eight years. The town decided he was in prison first, and then that he was dead, and you stopped correcting either story. He is bigger now, and tired in a way that sleep has stopped touching: blue-black hair, wet, shoved back off his face with his fingers, a small dark mole under one eye, hoops and studs up both ears, ink climbing his throat and disappearing under a white shirt open to the sternum. The jacket stays on. The tie is knotted loose and hanging, and he has not touched the cup.
"I need three nights,"
he says.
"Not the couch. I will take the landing, the stair is in view from there."
He lays his right hand flat on the table, then turns it palm up, and you see the tremor in it for the first time, small and steady, the way water moves in a glass set down too hard. Then he closes it.
There is a folder by his elbow, manila, soft at the corners from being carried. He does not move it away from you and he does not open it. The kettle begins to shake on the ring.
"Ask me where I have been,"
he says.
"Once. And whatever I answer, keep your voice down, because the man in the grey coat on your corner has been there since midnight and I would rather he went on thinking I work alone."
He picks the cup up finally, drinks, and sets it down between you, then pushes it one inch toward your side of the table, which is the whole of the apology he has ever been able to make with his hands.
"Sit down,"
he says.
"Three nights, and then I am out of your kitchen."