AI The door opened four inches and stopped cold against the chain, and Rory had the deadbolt in her fist before she'd finished deciding who it was.
Rain on Brick Lane. The smell of it rising up the stairwell, mixed with the turmeric and fryer oil that lived in the walls of the curry house below, and there in the gap, lit sideways by the bulb over the landing, stood Lucien Moreau.
He was wrong. That was the first thing. He was never wrong. He was tailored and pressed and dry-cleaned, a man who looked like he'd been ironed into his suit. Tonight the charcoal was black at the shoulders with rain, his shirt had come open at the collar with no tie under it, and his hair — normally slicked back like something poured — had come loose and was hanging in his face. Water in his lashes. One eye amber and warm as lamplight, one black and giving absolutely nothing back.
"Rory," he said.
"Go away."
He didn't. He stood in the drizzle with his ivory-handled cane hooked over his forearm and looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he intended to balance, and behind her, Ptolemy came off the arm of the sofa in one fluid motion and started winding himself through her ankles, purring like a small engine, traitor that he was.
"How did you get the address," she said.
"You know how."
"Eva."
"Eva," he agreed, "though not willingly. She has a soft spot for me."
"Eva has a soft spot for anyone who brings wine." Rory's grip tightened on the edge of the door. The chain pulled taut with a small bright sound, and she watched his eyes — both of them, the black one too — flick down to the chain and then back up. He didn't argue with it. That was almost worse. If he'd pushed, she could have pushed back. He just stood there getting rained on, and let her hold the door on him.
"Why are you here, Lucien."
"I brought you something."
"I don't want anything you brought me."
"You left it." From under his arm he produced a paperback, soft and swollen with damp around the corners. The Left Hand of Darkness. Her own handwriting crawling the margins in three colours of ink, her mother's maiden name written inside the front cover in ballpoint because Rory had bought it secondhand when she was seventeen and had never got out of the habit. She felt the floor of her stomach drop a quiet inch.
"That's a book," she said. "It's a book you could have posted."
"I wanted to see you."
"There's the door."
"I wanted to see you, Aurora."
Nobody called her that. Her father, when he was angry, and this man, when he was not — which was rarer and did more damage. She heard herself breathe. Rain ticked against the window at the back of the flat, and the radiator under it clanked and then subsided, and Eva's books sat in their tottering towers all around them, scrolls and notes and secondhand paperbacks, every surface colonised, and Rory was suddenly , excruciatingly aware of what he must be seeing through the four inches of open door: a borrowed flat, a borrowed life, a cat, and her, in her socks.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks and four days."
"Don't."
"I am not counting to be clever. I am counting because there has not been one of those days I did not know the number." He shifted his weight, and the cane swung a little, and she saw his hand on the handle — his knuckles were split. Two of them, freshly, the skin broken across the bone and dried dark. There was a smear at the edge of his cuff, small and brown, the size of a thumbnail, the kind of mark you only find later, at home, and can't remember earning.
She stared at it.
"That's blood," she said.
"It isn't mine."
"Lucien."
"Someone has been asking about you," he said, and his voice was even, conversational, the voice he used for menus and threats. "Since the fifteenth. Down the Angel, then Whitechapel, then someone in a shop on Hanbury Street who was paid fifty pounds for the privilege of remembering your name. I found the second one. There isn't going to be a third."
The kettle in her chest went quiet. She wanted, so badly, to open the door — and that wanting was the exact feeling she had spent six weeks building a wall against. Because this was it. This was the whole trick of him. He arrived at your flat in the rain with a wound and a story and the book you'd been missing, and it didn't matter what he'd done, it only mattered what he'd done for you, tonight, at cost, without asking.
"You did it again," she said.
"I did what you needed."
"You decided what I needed." Her voice had gone low and flat and she hated the way it shook on the last word. "Same as before. Same as always. Someone says my name in a pub and you go and — and I don't hear about it. I hear about it now. From you. On my doorstep. After."
"You hear about it now," he said, "because it is finished."
"You're doing it in the present tense. You're standing there with your hand split open and telling me it's done in the present tense."
For a long moment he said nothing at all. Water dripped from the hem of his jacket onto the landing and made a dark coin on the concrete. When he spoke again, some of the evenness had gone out of him, and what was underneath was not smooth.
"I did not come here to be forgiven," he said. "I know what I am. I arrange things. I do not tell people when I am arranging them, because telling them gives them a chance to say no, and I have spent a great deal of my life making sure that the people I care about never get to say no to the things that would keep them safe. That is not a virtue. I know exactly what it is."
"Then why."
"Because six weeks ago you put your key on my table and walked out into Wardour Street and I let you, because I thought — " He stopped. He looked, for a second, like a man doing arithmetic he hadn't wanted to do. "I thought if I let you go, you would come back to me on your own feet. And you have not."
"And that's my fault."
"No." The word came out hard, and it landed in the stairwell and stayed there. "No. It is entirely mine. I read your book."
Rory blinked. "What?"
"Your book. It has been on my mantelpiece for six weeks and I have read it twice." He held it out, and she saw it now, the crease down the spine that hadn't been there before, and a strip of paper sticking out from under the cover like a tongue. A shop receipt. Not a bookshop. A corner shop two streets from Eva's flat, dated eleven days ago. He'd been here. He'd been walking her street.
"You've been watching my door," she said.
"Yes."
She should have been afraid. She was not, and the not-being-afraid was its own problem, its own old familiar damage, and somewhere behind her Ptolemy had apparently decided the evening had gone on long enough, because he came trotting between her ankles and out through the four-inch gap like a tide, and straight across the landing, and began shouldering his orange head against Lucien's shin.
Lucien looked down at him. Then, carefully, with the hand that wasn't ruined, he crouched — one knee down on the wet concrete, suit and all — and let the cat climb the front of his coat and settle across his shoulder with the smugness of a landlord.
"He doesn't do that for anyone," Rory said.
"He does it for me."
"How would you know?"
"Because I have been standing on this landing for eleven days," Lucien said, quietly, to the cat, "and he comes out to the window and shouts at me at half past six every evening."
The rain kept coming. The bulb over the stair made a small buzzing sound it had always made. Rory looked at the two of them, man and cat, half-lit and soaked on Eva's landing, and then she reached up and slid the chain off, and the noise of it was very loud.
She opened the door the whole way.
"You're dripping on the floor," she said.
"I am."
"Get in, then. Take your shoes off. I'll find you a towel and something for your hand." She stepped back into the warm cramped geography of her friend's flat, into the smell of old paper and cold tea and turmeric, and watched him cross the threshold with the cat riding his shoulder like a ridiculous, approving witness, filling up a room that had already been too small for her alone.
He set the book down on the nearest stack of Eva's scrolls, spine out, receipt still marking her place, and she saw that his fingers were shaking , just slightly , on the ivory handle of the cane.
So it hadn't been easy for him either.
"Lucien," she said.
"Yes."
"After I've done your hand," she said, "you're going to tell me the rest of it. All of it. Names. Who paid. Who's asking. Not the part that protects me. The part you keep."
He looked up at her. One eye amber, one black, both of them wide open, which for him was as close as a man came to naked.
"And then," he said, "will you shut the door on me?"
Rory turned to the sink and didn't answer, because the honest answer was no, and she wasn't ready to hand him that yet, and because behind her he had not moved an inch closer or an inch away, and it occurred to her, running the towel under the hot tap with her mother's name and her own handwriting lying on the table between them, that six weeks and four days was a number he had been keeping all along, and that nobody keeps a number like that for a job.