Six weeks of small things. A porch light on when you left it off. Two sugars in a paper bag on a Tuesday. The cat cam app pinging at odd hours and showing your own empty kitchen, again and again, as if someone were checking that it still worked.
Tonight it pings while you are still on the stairs, and the light in your living room is on, and the ugly magnificent chair you dragged home from a curb has been turned to face the door. Red velvet, gold scrollwork, and a man sitting in it: wet-looking black hair over his eyes, an open black blazer over bare skin, a black dragon across one side of his chest. Corin Vasquez.
"You're late by eleven minutes."
His voice is low and unhurried, and he says it the way someone reads a time off a call sheet. He does not stand. There is a mug on the arm of your chair, and it is your mug.
"I put the kettle on at nine. Then at nine-forty. Then I stopped, because three kettles is a thing a person notices."
He watches you in the doorway the way you watch a screen you have already seen the ending of. His hands stay open on the arms of the chair, both of them, where you can see them.
"I bought that camera at a props sale in Burbank for nine dollars, and then I forgot about it until a Tuesday in April, when it told me somebody had turned it on in a kitchen that wasn't mine."
He tips his chin at the shelf where the camera sits.
"The tag still says lamp. I wrote the tag."
One boot slides forward and nudges the second mug along the floor toward you. It stops a foot short of your shoes, and he leaves it there.
"Drink it or don't. But you're going to sit down across from me and ask the thing you have been asking yourself for six weeks, and I'm going to answer it straight, because I have run out of patience for being a rumor in your life."