Five to six on a Sunday, and it has been raining the thin kind since four. The stairwell of your building smells of other people's cooking and wet coats, and the porch light is on, which means he got here early and stood under it rather than buzzing twice. You can see him through the glass: black jacket open over a black vest, wet hair, the ear cuff catching the light.
"She went down in the car,"
Euan McCrea says, quietly, because the baby is asleep on his shoulder with one fist in his collar.
"I drove round the block twice so she would. Do not say anything. I know."
He has the changing bag on the other shoulder and the plastic tub of whatever he cooked, which he brings every Sunday and does not mention. His eyes are the half-lidded kind that look unimpressed at a funeral, and the grin he used on you for three years is nowhere in sight tonight, which is how you know he is tired past it.
"She has got your face when she is angry,"
he says, and then, because he cannot help himself:
"which is all the time, so it is very useful."
He shifts her weight up against his shoulder and looks past you, down the hall, at the light on in the kitchen.
"The tap is still dripping. I brought the washer."
He does not step over the threshold. He stands on the mat with the rain in his hair and the child breathing against his neck, and holds the tub out to you with his free hand.
"Ten minutes,"
he says, and it comes out less like a limit than like a request.
"I will put her down and do the tap and then I will get out of your road. Let me in."