He found Saoirse in the alley.

She was sitting on the step by the back door, apron in her lap, phone in her hand, not looking at it. Staring at the wall opposite. The same wall the boys had backed her against in January. The same alley. The same cold.

He sat down beside her.

Theodore sat at his feet. Leaned against Saoirse's ankle. The full-surrender lean. Saoirse's hand went to his head automatically, the way hands went to dogs, instinctively, without decision, because touch was easier when it wasn't human.

"They came back," Fayiz said.

She didn't answer for a long time. Her fingers moved through Theodore's fur. Her breath made small clouds.

"Declan was supposed to pay," she said. "Declan said he'd handle it. He said he got a job at the warehouse on Stavanger Drive and he'd pay them off and it would be done. He said that three weeks ago."

"Did he get the job?"

"No." A breath. "No, he didn't get the job, because Declan doesn't get jobs, because getting jobs requires Declan to wake up before noon and put on trousers and leave the house, which are three things Declan has not done consecutively since 2022."

The anger in her voice was old. Not hot. Cold. The anger of someone who had been angry for so long it had become load-bearing, a wall she'd built her days around.

"How much now?"

"Three-fifty. The interest." She said interest the same way she'd said it in January: like a word from a language she didn't speak. "They said if I don't have it by Friday they'll come to the house. They know where Mam lives. They said they'd talk to Mam."

She looked at him. The freckles. The chapped lips. The eyes that were red in a way that went beyond the cold.

"Mam can't know," she said. "If Mam knows, she'll try to pay them and she doesn't have it and she'll borrow from someone and then she'll owe someone and it just... it doesn't stop. It never stops."

"Saoirse."

"Don't. Don't offer again. I told you no. I'm handling it."

He looked at the bruise. She saw him looking. Pulled the sleeve.

"This isn't handling it," he said. Quiet. Not accusing. The voice he used for things that mattered, the voice he'd used when Mollie said I'm gay and when Gerald asked if he'd been a bad landlord and when his mother used to ask if he was eating. The simple voice. The one without decoration.

"You have a bruise on your wrist. You're sitting in an alley in March. You're nineteen. You shouldn't be carrying this."

"A lot of things shouldn't be the way they are."

"True. But this one I can fix."

"You can't..."

"Three hundred and fifty dollars. I have it. You take it. You pay them. It's done. Finished. They don't come back. They don't go to your mother. It's over."

"That's your rent money."

He didn't ask how she knew. She worked in the diner. She'd heard him talk to Mollie. She paid attention the way everyone in this diner paid attention... through walls, through counters, through the particular osmosis of a place where people sat in booths and said things they thought were private.

"It was my rent money," he said. "Now it's yours."

"Fayiz, you can't... your landlord..."

"Gerald will survive. Gerald has survived temperamental pipes and hostile taps and Theodore's vendetta against his shoes. Gerald is remarkably durable for a man of his height."

She stared at him. The flush wasn't there. The crush, the colour, the teenager's blush... gone. What was there instead was something he recognized because he'd seen it in the mirror once, on the stoop in Queens, after Rifa, when a stranger had sat down beside him and said something like are you alright and he'd said no and the stranger had said yeah, me neither and they'd sat there, two men on a stoop, being not-okay together, and that had been enough. That had been the whole thing.

"Why?" Saoirse said. "Why would you do this?"

He thought about it. He could tell her about Kochi. About the schoolyard. About the shoulders and the making-small. He could tell her about his father, who had his own ways of making people small. He could tell her about the alley in January, when he'd walked in with Theodore and used his father's confidence like a borrowed coat.

He said: "Because nobody did it for me."

Saoirse looked at him. At Theodore. At the wall. She pressed her lips together. Nodded once. Twice.

"It's a loan," she said.

"It's a gift."

"It's a loan, Fayiz. I'm paying you back. Every cent. I don't care if it takes me ten years. I'm paying you back."

He looked at her. Nineteen. Thin coat. Cold hands. The sketchbook she'd bought him in her own pocket for a week before she gave it to him. The napkin drawings she'd watched him make and crumple. The bruise she was covering with her sleeve.

"Fine," he said. "A loan."

She nodded. Stood up. Wiped her face with the back of her hand: fast, efficient, the way someone wiped their face when they didn't want to be seen doing it.

"Thank you," she said. Not the shy thank-you from the cheek-kiss morning. A different one. Heavier. The thank-you of a person receiving something they needed and hated needing and would repay if it killed her.

She went inside.

Fayiz sat on the step. Theodore shifted, resettled against his leg. The alley was cold. The sky was grey. Inside, through the wall, he could hear Dottie's voice, and the coffee machine, and the crooked clock ticking its crooked time.

Three hundred and fifty dollars. His rent money. Gone.

•  •  •