Year Two

Camille took his shirt without a word.

She'd opened the door before he reached it. She stood there in a gray cardigan with her hair pulled back, and she looked at him once, from his unshaven jaw to the cigarette smell in his collar, and then she stepped aside and let him in. She didn't ask where he'd been. She didn't ask whose car had dropped him at the curb. She ran the bath hot, laid out a towel and a clean T-shirt, and carried his clothes down the hall to the machine as if they were any other laundry.

He heard the lid close. The dial click. Water start.

Nothing in her face had changed. That was the part he turned over later, lying in the bath with his knees up, the water going gray around him. She'd smelled Rainer on him like a stranger smells rain and had chosen, with perfect courtesy, to behave as if there'd been no weather.

His phone was on the edge of the tub. He had texted Rainer from the curb.

*Do you have a way back?*

The reply had taken four hours.

*Yes.*

Nothing else.

---

For two days she was careful with him.

She cooked, badly, and he ate it. She asked about nothing. She let him sleep until noon on Saturday and moved around the apartment as if he were a sick man in the next room, closing doors softly, lowering the television. On Saturday evening she told him, in the same tone she might have used for the weather, that she'd spoken to Tommy Brandt's lawyer.

"Twenty-two thousand and a signed release," she said. "He won't file. It's done."

"You paid him."

"From the joint account. I'd rather spend it on that than on a lawyer for you."

He opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

"I'm not asking for anything," Camille said. "I wanted you to know it was handled."

It was the kindest thing anyone had done for him all week. It was also a bill with his name on it, and she hadn't needed to write the number down.

Sunday night she brought her laptop to the dining table and set it between them with a cup of ginger tea at her elbow.

"I want to show you something," she said. "You can say no."

On the screen was a spreadsheet. He'd have recognized her formatting anywhere, the clean gray headers, the cells shaded in pale green where the numbers were safe. Five years across the top. Harbor Street in year one. The second development in year three. A line she'd labeled *A. Associates* that he realized, slowly, was his own firm, drawn as it would be if it grew.

"I didn't put it together to push you," she said. "I put it together because I couldn't sleep. When I can't sleep I plan."

She scrolled. A house, a real one, with a lot number and a school district. A mortgage schedule so conservative it almost made him laugh. Another tab opened to a floor plan she'd drawn herself on graph paper and photographed, the lines uneven, the ink bleeding at the corners.

"North light," Camille said, and tapped a small room at the back. "For when you want to draw again."

He hadn't drawn anything for himself in six years. He hadn't told her he missed it. He had mentioned it once, drunk, on a balcony in Lisbon, and she had filed it somewhere and kept it for four years until she needed it.

He looked at the plan the way he looked at any plan. That was the trap. He couldn't help it. His eye went to the load paths first, the spans, the circulation, and he found it was good. It was a good house. Each room had been placed by someone who understood how he would walk through it at six in the morning.

There was a smaller room at the top of the stairs. She'd drawn it in dotted line.

"Year two," Camille said, very lightly, "if we're lucky."

He didn't ask what she meant. He knew exactly what the dotted line meant. She wasn't telling him anything. She was letting the room do it, the way you leave a door open in a house so someone can find the next one.

He scrolled further because it was easier than speaking. A funding tab. Capital sources, a column of entities with brisk abbreviations. Halfway down, an entry stopped his eye.

*VT disbursement (Yr 1): $1,180,000.*

"What's VT?"

"Voss Trust." She didn't look up from her tea. "Maggie's estate planning. Elias's share rolled into the development fund after he died. You signed that, remember? Right after Harbor Street."

He didn't remember. He'd signed forty documents that spring.

He looked at the number a moment longer. Then he scrolled on, down to a row of totals, and the number was gone, absorbed into a column of tidy green.

That was the second time he'd looked away from something that week. He noticed it the way you notice a stain on a ceiling you've decided not to mention.

"Cam."

"Yes."

"It's good." He heard his own voice. "It's a good plan."

She put her hand over his on the table. Her palm was warm and dry. "Say it properly."

"I'll come home."

It wasn't hard. That was the horror of it. Four words, and the thing in his chest that had been braced for two weeks went slack all at once, as if someone had cut a cable. The room got quiet. He saw the north-light room, the graph-paper ink, the cup of tea. He saw a life where he never again opened a bathroom door to check a phone.

Camille's eyes filled. She didn't say anything. She pressed his hand to her cheek and shut her eyes.

On the table, his phone buzzed once.

Unknown number. He turned it over with his free hand because it was easier than letting go of hers.

A photograph.

It took him a few seconds to understand it.

A man at a kitchen table with a mug held in both hands. Cropped hair, grown out unevenly, a patchy beard. Too thin. The collarbones stood out through the neck of his shirt like handles. He was looking directly into the lens with eyes that were much too steady, the eyes of someone who knew exactly who would see this and had chosen not to smile.

There was cerulean paint, dried hard, on the left cuff of his sleeve.

In the lower corner of the frame, in small white digits, was a date.

Three days ago.

*Three days.* On that day Jose had sat in a funeral director's office reading a revision block. He'd stood in Mrs. Hallett's hallway before a pencil cat. And somewhere, some ordinary morning, with a kettle going and a window behind him, his brother had picked up a phone and held it at arm's length and looked at himself and taken a picture.

Alive. Not a story. Not a grave. Not a thing you could set on a shelf in a plan.

Camille's hand was still on his. Her cheek was still against his knuckles. He was looking at a dotted line on a laptop screen, the small room at the top of the stairs, and he thought, quite calmly, that he had agreed to build a nursery in a house with north light while his brother ate cereal alone in a city he couldn't name.

"Jose?"

"It's work."

"It's nine o'clock on a Sunday."

"It's a contractor."

He felt her stop. It was a very small sound. Her thumb, which had been moving across his knuckles, went still.

"Okay," she said. She let go.

He stood. His knees seemed to belong to somebody else. "I'm going to take this in the other room."

"Of course." She lifted her tea. Her eyes stayed on the laptop. "I'll be here."

In the bathroom he locked the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and sent the photograph to Rainer with four words.

*Where is he. Who?*

The three dots appeared at once. Disappeared. Appeared again.

*I didn't send that.*

Then, a moment later:

*I didn't take that.*

Jose's mouth went dry.

*Jose. Look at the picture. Who has his phone?*