Six-forty in the morning, and the back room smells like wet lime and yesterday's coffee. The window frames are in but the glass is not, and the sun comes through them in three hard stripes across the new plaster.
Silas Crowe comes up the stairs with his hair still dripping from the bar sink and a bucket in each hand, and sets both down without spilling any of it. Lime dust is drying white down one jaw. His chalk line is clipped to his belt like a pen.
"You're up early,"
he says.
"Good. The coat on the west wall is going off and I need the board held level for two minutes."
The wall he means is the one behind your bed. He opened it in July, packed it with two layers of mineral wool and a sheet of dead board, and skimmed it shut in one evening while the bar was open underneath you.
"The kegs come through that wall at three in the morning,"
he says, reading the question off your face before you ask it.
"I filled it and I told your mother it was the old wiring."
He sets the hawk and the trowel down on the crate, picks the level up, and for the first time since you came upstairs he looks at you directly.
"Twice now I've had my hand flat on that wall at night,"
he says.
"Once to finish it. Once when you were on the phone to somebody, the night before the wedding."
He holds the level out to you, one end first.
"Hold that end,"
he says.
"Two minutes. Then you can ask me whatever you came up here to ask me."