Page 4

"To live in?"

He considers the question, and I suspect he considers most things like this, all the way down. "Haven't figured out what I bought it for yet," he says.

It's an honest answer. I can tell because it's so unpolished, the kind of answer you only give a stranger in a basement at ten o'clock at night. I feel it settle in my chest like a stone dropped in a well.

"Well," I say, and my voice is softer than I mean it to be. "It's a good house. It talks a lot. You get used to it."

"I noticed." There's a beat. "You hum."

My face goes hot all the way to my ears. "I what?"

"Through the wall. All evening. It's..." He stops. I watch him decide to say the next thing. "It's not bad."

Nobody has ever described my humming as not bad. I'm not sure what to do with a compliment that has been so sanded.

I turn toward the stairs because turning toward the stairs is something I can do. I put one foot on the first step.

"Mind the last one on the way up," he says. "It lies in both directions."

He lifts his flashlight, and the beam falls on the stairs in front of my feet. Bright on the old wood, not on my face.

It's a thing no one has done for me in a very long time, lighting the ground instead of me. I climb the whole flight in the circle of it feeling like a woman being walked home.

At the top, I look back.

He's still at the foot of the stairs with the light held up, his face half in shadow, watching me as if I might vanish the moment he blinks.

"Goodnight, Ben," I say.

"Hollis."

He says it like turning a key. All of it, both syllables, as if it were a full sentence.

I close the basement door behind me and stand in my own dark hallway with a palette knife in my fist and my heart making a noise like a loose shutter.

The playlist has restarted itself by the time I get back to the living room. Ella picks up three words from where she left off.

I kneel at the banner, take up the brush, and put one last stroke of orange on the last leaf. The line wobbles. I stare at it, and then I start to laugh, quietly, the kind of laugh that is mostly breath.

I put the brush down. I don't pick it up again.

I go to bed at midnight. I lie awake thinking about the black dress, and I listen to the wall. I hear water running next door, a shower, and then nothing. Then one long creak as a lot of man settles onto a mattress that isn't broken in.

After that there's only the wall, and the house settling around me, and my own pulse.

I'm not sure what time it is when I wake. I know the sound before I'm awake enough to name it.

It's a sharp inhale, the kind a person takes coming up from the bottom of deep water. Then a thump, a fist or a shoulder against a headboard. Then a voice, without words, low and steady and repeated, a cadence like someone counting, trying to hold a line against something I can't see.

It isn't a new sound. I can hear that in the counting. Whatever this is, he has been doing it alone for a long time.

I lie very still.

I know what I want to do. I want to go next door in my nightshirt and my bare feet, and I know exactly why I can't. I've known the man for five hours. He doesn't know I can hear him. He would hate it. He would hear my knock on his door as a trespass, and he'd be right.

But I remember being nine years old in a dark room in my grandmother's house, the nights long as a held breath, and the sound that came through the wall between our bedrooms. Three soft knocks. Not a door opening, not a light switched on. Just a knuckle on plaster, patient as rain.

I'm here. I'm not coming in unless you ask.