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He turned to the east window instead of to me. “Good light in the mornings,” he said.

Then he didn’t leave. He shifted his weight onto one foot and didn’t speak, and I waited, because he had more and was working out how much of it to hand over.

“There’s no stove in here.” He said it to the room. “Kettle, microwave, bar fridge. It was built for somebody’s mother-in-law over a long weekend. You eat with us. It’s in the document, page two, and it isn’t me being generous. There’s nowhere for you to cook.”

“Understood.”

“Home games I’m gone by four and back around eleven. Road nights I’m not back at all.” He turned back to the window. “You do bedtime and then you stay in the house until I’m in it. Not the casita. The house. She’d sleep through the smoke alarm, and I am not having the house and two doors between her and an adult on the nights I’m not here.”

“Okay, so that’s forty-one home games and a road schedule I have not looked up yet because I did not want to know the number on my first morning.” I said it lightly and it came out lighter than I meant it. “That’s fine. I mean that, it’s fine. I’m telling you the number out loud so that neither of us pretends later that I didn’t hear it.”

“There’s a good couch.”

“I saw it on the way in. It looks like an excellent couch. It also looks like it has opinions about posture, and I intend to ignore them.”

He put a hand up on the door frame and stayed where he was.

“Other side of it,” he said. “The days I’m home are yours. Not on call. Yours. If something in this house needs doing on one of those days, it can need it at me.”

“That isn’t in the document.”

“The document’s about the nights.” He was watching the block wall out the window. “I hired somebody for the hours I can’t be here. Not for the ones I can.”

Here was a man I’d met twice drawing a line around my hours before I’d worked out how to ask for one.

“Okay,” I said, and had to work to get the word flat.

“Go somewhere on them. That part’s not my business.”

He kept his eyes on mine past the end of it. I didn’t look away, towels forgotten, and had the distinct and humiliating thought that I would have stood there as long as he wanted me to.

“Okay,” he said, and left.

I put my bag down in the middle of the casita and took stock. There were more hangers in the closet than I had clothes.

The books took several trips out to the car. No casita was built to hold that many paperbacks, and I lined them along the wall under the east window in two rows, spines out, and when I was done the room belonged to a reader, even if the closet didn’t yet. A lot of those spines had shirtless men on them. I turned a few around so the pages faced out, in case Iris came visiting, and left the rest to fend for themselves.

Then I went to find Iris.

She was in the kitchen in her pajamas with her light-up sneakers on the wrong feet, standing on a step stool at the counter with Gerald propped against the backsplash. Every time she shifted her weight the sneakers flashed red around the soles. From the sound of it, Gerald was hearing a closing argument.

“He says he’s not hungry,” she said, without turning around. “But he always says that and then he wants crackers.”

“Classic Gerald,” I said. “He gets an idea about a texture and then the rest of us just live inside it.”

She turned and gave me the same unhurried read she’d given me at the facility, head to toe and back up, and what she found there passed. “She’s going to make breakfast,” she told Gerald. “You can have crackers after.”

There was an index card on the counter, written in small, precise block letters.

Eggs. Diagonal toast. OJ before she sits. Gerald gets a plate.

I read it again. Gerald gets a plate, written down, in ink, because it mattered. Iris needed Gerald at the table, and Eli knew it, and he’d sat down with a pen and written it out so I wouldn’t have to guess on my first morning.

I got out a small plate and set it at Gerald’s spot, and the dragon received it as his due.

Then I had to grip the counter edge and work on my throat for a bit, in a house I’d barely moved into, over an empty plate and a stuffed animal.

Get it together, Rhodes. It’s a plate.