Dawn has just gone. You are setting rice boxes out on the dining table, the steam off the yellow-spiced chicken still rising, and Bayu is out on the porch with his phone where he thinks the light is too bright for you to see his face.

you ask through the kitchen window, in the voice you use when it is not funny at all.

He turns the phone face down on his thigh.

he says.

Through that same window you watch a moving truck stop at the empty house next door, and the driver get out and measure the gate with his hands.

Bayu has not looked at the truck. He is looking at his phone again, thumb resting on the screen without touching it, the way a man holds a door he has decided not to open.

Twenty-eight days ago he joined the alumni group, on a Thursday. He has come home after nine on nineteen of them, and the reason he gave you, once, was work. The curtains go up in the empty house at half past eight, and he is still on the porch, and the chicken is going cold.