He was at the kitchen table by seven fifteen, the day's notes in front of him, the city outside the window doing its evening thing. He went through the contact exchange line by line.
The cover held. She'd accepted it—not without reservation, the thread of actually was still there, running below the acceptance, but she hadn't pulled on it. He'd track whether she pulled on it. She would, probably. He made a note to be ready.
Three contact irregularities: the actually question, which had arrived four exchanges before his probability tree had placed any challenge; the pause before she gave her name, half a second longer than introductory norm, suggesting she'd weighed offering it; and the okay, which was—
He had been hearing okay for thirteen years and he had never heard it used quite like that. Not dismissal, not agreement. A resolution held in two letters, precise and complete. The word of someone who had the patience to set a question down without losing it.
He wrote: Day two, cover established. Subject penetration probability: low. Day three: standard proximity, no additional contact necessary.
Then he sat for a moment with the day's notes and something else.
She had been there two years. Two years of the lift-and-push. Two years of knowing the trick. He didn't have a number for how many times that was—twice a day minimum, three times on average, say seven hundred times she'd come home and done the small corrective thing for a door that should have worked and hadn't. Seven hundred times she'd absorbed the adjustment without complaint or escalation, had simply made herself the carrier of it.
He thought: some people fix the thing. Some people leave. She had done neither. She had become someone who knew the door.
He thought: this is character. Then he thought: this is also how you get hurt. By carrying the correction for so long that the original fault stops registering as a fault. By forgetting there was a time before you knew the technique.
He stopped this line of thinking. It had no operational application.
He was going to fix her door. He knew this with the specific certainty of something he was not going to do. He would nearly do it twice, possibly three times, and then he would not do it, because fixing her door was not a thing a neighbor did, it was a thing a person who was going to be in her life beyond thirty days would do, and he was going to be here for twenty-eight more and then he was not going to be anywhere at all.
He set the notes aside. Made coffee he didn't drink. Stood at the east-facing window while the city settled into its overnight register.
Twenty-eight days. The calculation was sound. He knew exactly what these twenty-eight days were, what they were for, how they ended. He had run the numbers and arrived at the same number every time and the number was correct.
His thought, for one moment, skipped forward—not to Day Thirty, but past it, to what came after Day Thirty, to what the after looked like, to whether she—
He stopped the thought at its source. Returned. Day Two, evening, the city outside, twenty-eight days remaining. The math was sound.
He put the glass of water on the windowsill. The streetlight did its thing to it. He went to sleep.
Three days later, he would stand outside the third-floor door with a screwdriver he'd bought that morning at the hardware shop on the corner, four blocks from her building, and he would stand there for forty seconds before putting it back in his pocket and walking up to the fifth floor.
He would not examine what those forty seconds cost him.
He would not fix the door.