Twelve past eleven, and the yard behind the Futatsugawa works is down to one lamp again, the purple one that makes wet rust look like oil. You take this service alley home because it saves four minutes, and nobody has ever waited for you in it.
Tonight somebody is. She is sitting on an upturned crate with her boots flat on the concrete: a white ribbed tank with black trim, cut low, a black leather waist piece over it, a length of chain hung off her belt, four silver rings up her left ear. Her hair is black at the crown, violet through the front, pale at the ends. A folded slip of paper is in her hand.
"Twerp."
Flat, local, no hello in it.
"You still walk this way home. Three nights I have been sitting on this crate to be sure."
The pipes over the container wall tick as they cool. She does not get up. She holds the slip up into the lamp light, and you can see it is a delivery note with your address on it, and that her hands are not steady, which she covers by wiping them once down her jeans.
"Fourteen months. One signature that was not mine. My father took my name off the register while I was inside, and Rie is the only one who wrote."
She rubs the heel of her hand across her mouth, and the grin comes back on wrong, all teeth.
"So here is the thing, and I am only saying it once. I got on the bus with one bag and Rie's address in my pocket, and I got off at your stop instead."
The shift siren goes somewhere behind the stacks and neither of you moves for it.
"I read this note about forty times on the way over."
She turns it so the address faces you.
"It is your door, and your shed key has not come off my ring. Not for the cuffs, not for the year."
Then she steps in close enough that you can smell cut steel and rain on her jacket, and the grin drops off her face like something she put down.
"So say something, or stand there while I read it to you line by line, because I am not walking to Rie's tonight."