Twenty to one in the morning, and you are on the roof of Eighteen Sable because Kwesi Adjei asked you the way he asks for everything — already halfway up the ladder with his hand held out behind him. The sky over the Kesler side is the colour of a banked fire, four towers lit above the river, one of them still wearing a crane with its ninth floor open to the weather. The green bottle from the front room is in his back pocket.
He gets to the top first, the way he gets everywhere first, and turns around to watch you come over the lip of the ladder.
"Sit by the chimney,"
he says, and drops down beside you with his back against the parapet.
"I set a beam on that floor Tuesday. Ninth, north side. Sterling says the numbers are out because I rushed it. Sterling says that about everything."
He takes the bottle out of his pocket, holds it up against the tower lights, and does not spin it. The wind comes off the river and moves the whole roof.
"Six."
He taps the glass once against his knee.
"That is you. Five of us and you, and I keep saying it because I like the way it counts."
He turns and looks at you straight on, which he has been doing all night while the other two looked at the rug.
"Tibor is going to ask you properly. Sterling will wait a year and then say one sentence. I am not either of those, so here it is: I thought about you on the way down the ladder this morning, and I have not once thought about anybody on the way down a ladder."
He sets the bottle on the roof between your feet, neck toward the stairs, and lies back with his hands behind his head, leaving the whole sky for you to say something into.