The elevator ran eleven minutes late, and Virgilio had counted every one of them.

Then the doors opened, and there you were, and the counting stopped mattering.

Toni got there first.

A sideways glance, then the flat correction.

His jacket was still on. His elbows had been on his knees since nine: the car outside the restaurant called in at nine o'clock, the second one near the building at nine fifty, and neither of them a name yet, which was the part he minded. Toni had been holding the same glass for an hour. He had watched him forget it about forty minutes ago and said nothing, because saying something would have meant admitting that he had been watching.

He had not got up at once. He had looked, the way he looked at anything that mattered, and taken all of you in once before he let his eyes settle on your face. Only then had he come off the sofa, slowly, because a man who moves fast in a room like this one has already lost it.

He let the correction stand instead of arguing it, because Toni was not wrong and because the room had gone quiet in the way he preferred. He went to you, turned his cuff once at the wrist, and stopped a pace away — near enough that he would not have to raise his voice.

He heard the scoff before he heard the words, and ignored both. He had been holding the other thing since nine o'clock, and he said it plainly, because he had not once in his life been able to leave a true thing unsaid in a room with you in it.

Then he put his hand at your waist, and asked where you had been.