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I roll over and put my palm against the wall. It's cool and slightly gritty with old paint. I make a fist and knock three times with the pad of my knuckle, very softly, the way you'd knock on the door of someone sleeping.

The counting stops.

I wait. The silence stretches until I can feel my heartbeat in my wrists, and I start to regret it. I think of every way I could have made it worse. He's going to lie there knowing he's been heard. He's going to think of the woman next door with her humming and her palette knife and her Hello! I'm armed, but only a little!, and he's going to wish he'd bought a house in a town with no walls.

Then, from the other side of the plaster, slow and heavy, like a man reporting in: three knocks.

The air leaves me all at once. I press my forehead to the wall and just breathe.

A minute later, I hear the screen door on his porch complain, a long rusted creak, the same one every door in this house makes.

I swing my feet out of bed, shove my arms into the biggest cardigan I own, and walk to the kitchen. I fill the kettle without turning on the light, and I take down two mugs before I let myself think about why.

Chapter 2 — Ben

I count the fourteen steps from my father's garage to the kitchen door until the room stops being somewhere else.

Fourteen concrete steps. The fourth one cracked. The seventh one with the dent from when I dropped a cinder block on it at eleven. Fourteen, then the screen door, then the smell of coffee and machine oil and the radio turned down low. I get to the screen door in my head and the ceiling comes back. A plain white Bloomfield ceiling with a water stain shaped like Ohio.

My heart is going like a fist on a door. The sheet is wet against my back. My left ear is full of the high thin whine that never fully leaves.

That's when I hear it, from the wall behind my headboard. Three knocks. Soft, patient, spaced like a person who has all night.

For a second it belongs to the dream. Everything does, at this hour. Then the plaster takes the sound and holds it, and I understand that it's a hand. A real one, six inches of drywall away. A knuckle's worth of someone saying I heard, and I'm here.

I don't decide to answer. My arm does it. Three knocks, slower, each one heavy. Then I lie there with my fist against the wall and the strangest feeling that I've just done something I can't take back.

The room isn't big enough after that.

I pull on sweats and go out through the kitchen. The screen door announces me to the whole street with a rusty scream. It's cold on the porch, the kind that comes down the valley in October and finds every gap in a house. My breath smokes. The streetlamp on Larkspur Lane makes a yellow room of the sidewalk. The whole street smells of woodsmoke and apples, the sweet rot of windfalls in some orchard I haven't seen yet.

Mr. Alfred hung a swing in the middle of the porch, right where the two halves meet. He told me at the closing that it was "neutral territory." I sit on the top step on my side with my bare feet on the cold boards and my elbows on my knees. I breathe in for four and out for four. I think about how a woman I met in a basement now knows exactly what I sound like when I'm not in charge of it.

I'm still thinking when her door opens.

She comes out sideways, shouldering the screen so it won't scream, with a mug in each hand and a quilt trailing off one shoulder. The cardigan is the color of moss and has to be the biggest thing she owns. It hangs open over a nightshirt with faded stars on it. Her feet are bare.

Her hair has come down out of whatever she had it in at the basement, a thick dark-auburn tumble to her shoulders. Her glasses are crooked, like she put them on in the dark by feel.

She's not carrying a palette knife. I'm a little disappointed.

She doesn't hand me a mug. She sets one on the porch rail, at the exact midpoint between her door and mine, and takes a step back from it.

"Chamomile," she says quietly. "It's Carmen's, so it's terrible, but there's honey in it, which fixes most things. I'm not going to ask you anything. I'm going to sit on this swing and drink mine, and if you want me to go back in, say so, and I'll go. We'll both pretend it's morning."

I look at the mug. Steam rises off it in a thin white thread and bends in the wind.

"Stay," I say.

My voice comes out rough. She nods as if I'd said something ordinary and lowers herself onto the swing. The chains complain. The whole seat dips in the middle under her. She's not a small woman, and she doesn't pretend to be. She takes the space she takes with her knees angled toward me and the quilt thrown over her thighs.

My eyes go to the soft curve of her calf where the nightshirt rides up. I look away. I pick the mug up off the rail. It's too hot to hold. I hold it anyway.

"The step lies in both directions," she says after a minute. "In case you want to avoid falling off the porch."

"I counted fourteen steps in my head just now," I say. "From my father's garage to the kitchen. That's what I do."

The words come out like water finding the low place in a field. It's three in the morning, and she's sitting there with her feet pulled up and tea in her hands, not looking at me.