Rain runs down the windscreen in long threads and the wipers take their time about it.

Torgeir drives with one hand. The other rests on the gear stick, thumb tapping once every few seconds, which is the only thing he has done for eleven minutes. The radio is off. The phone in the console has been face down since he switched the engine on, and it has not buzzed.

The party is four streets behind you. You can still feel the bass in your back teeth.

Rashid had, in fairness, been funny.

Two hours of his jokes, his arm slung over the back of the bench, his shoulder warm against yours, and you laughing the way you laugh when the night is good and nobody is counting. Torgeir stood by the door the whole time with a bottle he never opened. He did not once come over and take you away from it.

He did not once stop watching it, either.

The heater is on low and it is doing nothing. His jacket is folded on the back seat where he put it when he came to find you at eleven, and the bottle he carried all evening is on the floor behind your seat, still full, still sealed, which tells you more about the last three hours than anything he has said.

The car slows and turns in at the empty lot behind the Alderley street, and he cuts the engine. Rain keeps coming down, loud on the roof.

His voice is quiet and unhurried, the way he always goes when he is not quiet at all.

He turns in the seat so you can see both his hands. He does that, always, at the start of the conversations that matter.

He looks at you steadily, and there is a small beauty mark just under his right eye that you notice about twice a night.

Rain. A car passing somewhere on the main road.

he says.

He waits. He does that too. He waits past the point where most people start filling the silence.

One finger lifts from the gear stick.

A pause, and the corner of his mouth moves.