The lock clicked.

Alex's eyes were already open. He didn't know when they'd opened — somewhere in the grey hour, maybe, when the ticking of the hall clock had thinned out and the room had gone from black to the color of old teeth. He'd been lying on his back with one hand hooked over the crib rail and his glasses crooked on his nose, and the mobile had stopped turning at some point in the night, and the house had gone so quiet that his own breathing had seemed like company. Then the lock clicked, out in the hall, a small brass sound, and the quiet broke.

He turned his head on the mattress. The sheet under his cheek was damp and cold where it wasn't warm from his body. His glasses had slid down and the room came to him through a smeared lens — the changing table, the lamp, the door. He didn't move his hand off the rail. He couldn't have said why. It just stayed there, curled, the wood gone warm under it overnight.

The door swung open.

Light came in first — the hall light, thin and yellow, laying a stripe across the floor and up the far wall. Then Mistress Verity, standing in the doorway with one hand still on the knob. A silk robe, the color of weak tea, belted loose at the waist, the collar open at her throat. Her hair was down. He'd never seen it down. It fell past her shoulders, black and flat from sleep, and her face was bare — no mask, no makeup, nothing between her skin and the morning. The small mole by her left eyebrow sat there like it had always been there, which it had, which he'd seen last night, and still it caught him now. The light from the hall found it. It was the only thing on her face that moved him, that soft brown fleck, and he didn't know why.

She looked at the room. She took it in the way someone takes in a room they've walked into a thousand mornings — not fast, not slow. The lamp on the changing table. The empty bottle on the floor by the rocking chair, tipped on its side. The crib. Him in it. The diaper across his thigh, sagged and heavy and dark, the tapes long since given up, one heart-shaped tab stuck to the sheet where it had peeled free in the night.

She didn't say anything.

The smell of the room arrived at him then, the way it does when someone else's face tells you it's there — the sour formula gone stale in the bottle, the baby powder he'd been dusted with a lifetime ago, the old wood of the crib, and under it all the blunt animal fact of the diaper. He'd been breathing it all night. It had stopped being a smell. Her face made it a smell again.

He felt his ears go hot. He felt it in his neck first, that prickle, and then up across his cheekbones, and he hated that she could see it and he couldn't stop it, and he didn't look away from her. That was the one thing he had. He kept his eyes on her face, on the mole, and let the heat do what it did.

"Good morning," she said.

Her voice was lower than in the emails. There was no performance in it, no velvet. Just a woman in a robe, at first light, greeting a man in a crib.

"Morning," he said. His own voice came out wrecked. He cleared his throat and tried again and it was no better. "Morning."

She let the door go. It stayed open, resting against the wall, and the hall light kept coming in past her, and she crossed the room. Bare feet on the floorboards. He listened to them — four steps, five — and then she was at the crib, close enough that he could see the weave of the robe's silk, the way it hung off one shoulder and caught the lamp's glow and went from tea-colored to something almost gold where the light hit the fold. The belt had come half undone in the night. The ends of it hung down past her hip.

She stood over the crib and looked down at him. The bars were between them. He was on his back looking up, his glasses crooked, his hair stuck to his forehead on one side, the pink dress rucked up over his stomach and one thigh bare where the tights had given out at the knee. The run in the tights had grown in the night — he could feel the cold air on his knee, a little circle of it, the way you feel a hole in your sock.

She looked at the diaper. Not at him. At the diaper, across his thigh, the sag of it, the dark stain spreading up the front where it had soaked through and dried and soaked again.

His hand came off the crib rail. He didn't remember deciding to move it. It just came off and dropped to his side and lay there on the damp sheet, useless, and he wished he'd left it where it was, because now he had nothing to hold.

"You slept," she said.

"Some."

"In it."

He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer. He'd slept in his own mess because there was nothing else to do, because the crib was locked, because the door was shut, because the whole night had been one long slow decision not to scream, and somewhere in the middle of it he'd gone under and stayed under and the mess had just been part of the body he was sleeping in.

Verity reached through the bars.

He watched her hand come down — the wrist, the tendons on the back of it, the nails short and clean. It landed on the waistband of the diaper where it had slid down to his hip. Her fingers found the elastic. Then one finger — just the one, the index — hooked under it and lifted.

The elastic peeled off his skin. The sound was dry and small. He felt the cool air rush in where the diaper had been sealed to him all night, that sudden wet-cold against his hip, and his whole body went tight. Not flinching away. Tight the other way. Tight like something braced to be held.

She held it there. An inch of slack. Her finger still caught, the elastic stretched off his skin, the weight of the diaper hanging from her hand and from his hip at once, and the room went so quiet he could hear the hall clock ticking again, one, two, three, all the way down the hall and into the crib and into the inch of air she'd opened between the diaper and his body.

He looked at her face. She was looking at the inch of slack. Not at him. At the work of her own finger, at the way the elastic had left a red line on his skin, a mark where the diaper had been biting him all night and he hadn't noticed until it was lifted away.

His mouth opened. He didn't know what he was going to say. It stayed open, and nothing came out, and he closed it again.

She didn't fill the silence. She let it stand there between them, that open mouth of his, the tick of the clock, the smell of the room, and she kept her finger hooked in the elastic like she had all the time in the world and was going to spend it exactly here.

The crib rail was still warm where his hand had been. He could feel it against his other arm, the heat bleeding off the wood, his own heat, left behind in a place he couldn't take it back from.

And she watched him wait.

His hand was still on the sheet where it had fallen. He looked at it. The fingers were loose, the knuckles gone soft, and there was a crease across the back of it from the rail — a red line, the same red the elastic had left on his hip. He hadn't noticed that either. The night had left its marks on him in places he couldn't see, and now the morning was going to make him see them one at a time.

Her finger stayed in the elastic. She hadn't moved it. It was the only part of her that was touching him and it held the whole room still around it — the diaper hanging, the inch of air, the smell coming up out of the opened waistband now that it had somewhere to go. It came up warm. It came up his own, and he felt her take it in through her nose, slow, without any change in her face, and that was worse than a wince, that she could stand over him and breathe him and keep her eyes exactly where they were.

"The sheet's ruined," she said.

He turned his head. He looked at it because she'd told him to look at it — the mattress under him, the cotton gone from white to that grey-yellow ring where he'd soaked through and slept on it and soaked through again. There was a bloom near his hip the size of a dinner plate. There was a smaller one down by his knee where the diaper had slid sideways in the night and let go against the sheet instead.

"I'll wash it," he said.

"You will."

Not thank you. Not an argument. Just the flat little future tense, handed back to him, and he heard in it the whole shape of the day — the bucket, the cold water, the soap, the line out back where the neighbors could see a crib sheet hanging. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them she had moved her finger at last, letting the elastic snap back down, and the diaper settled onto his hip again with a wet slap, and the air she'd opened closed up and took the smell with it, mostly, except now he knew it was there and so did she and there was no putting that back.

She straightened. Her hand came away and she wiped the pad of that finger against the silk of her robe, once, a small absent gesture, like she'd touched something in a kitchen. Then she reached down along the outside of the crib rail, past his arm, and he heard the bolt move — a scrape, a click, and the side of the crib dropped on its hinges and swung down and away from him with a creak that went through the whole frame.

The bars were gone. The room was just a room again, and he was lying on a bare mattress in it with a ruined diaper across his thigh and a run in his tights and nothing between him and her at all.

He didn't get up. He wasn't sure he'd been told to. He lay there and looked up at her, and she looked down at him, and the light from the hall laid itself along the floor between them and neither of them crossed it.

"There's a bin in the bathroom," she said. "The little one by the sink. You'll put that in it. Not the kitchen. Not the outside can. That one."

"Okay."

"Then you'll strip the sheet and put it in the tub to soak. Cold water. Not warm. You'll know why when you smell it."

"Okay."

"Then you'll shower. There's soap and a cloth on the shelf. You'll use both. Twice." She paused, and her eyes went down him once, unhurried, the way they'd gone over the room. "You'll want to be clean for the rest of today."

The rest of today. He held onto the words. They were the first thing she'd said that pointed past this room, past the bin and the tub and the shower, and he wanted to ask what was in the rest of today and knew better than to ask, because the not-asking was part of it, because the whole thing ran on him not knowing and her knowing, and he lay still and let the question sit in his chest where it could do its work.

She turned. Bare feet on the floorboards again, five steps, four, and she stopped in the doorway with her back to the hall and one hand on the frame. Her hair had shifted forward over her shoulder. The robe had come open a little more at the collar and he could see the notch at the base of her throat, the small hollow there, and he looked at it and then away, because it wasn't his to look at, and she hadn't said he could.

"Alex."

His name. Not the email name, not the username, not the little titles she wrote in her neat hand on the cards. His name, in her low morning voice, from the doorway, and it went through him the way the elastic had — small and dry and all the way in.

"Yes."

"You did well last night."

He didn't say anything. He couldn't. The words sat in the room and he lay under them and felt his face go hot all over again, and this time it wasn't shame, or it wasn't only shame, it was something with a floor under it, something that had been waiting all night in the dark to be told exactly that and had nearly given up.

She stepped out into the hall. The light took her. Her footsteps went down the boards, away, toward the kitchen, and a door opened somewhere and closed, and then there was the small domestic sound of a tap running, and then nothing but the clock.

He lay in the open crib a while longer. The mattress was cold where his body wasn't. The mobile hung above him, still, its four animals turned to the wall. He lifted his hand and looked at the red line across the back of it, and then he put the hand down on the wet sheet and pushed himself up to sitting, and the diaper slid down his thigh and hung there, heavy as a wet towel, and he sat on the edge of the mattress with his bare knee out through the run in his tights and looked at the door she'd left open behind her.

The hall was empty. The stripe of light lay across the floor and up the far wall, exactly where it had been. He stood up, and his legs were stiff from the night, and the glass slippers were somewhere under the crib and he didn't reach for them. He walked to the door the way he was — dress, tights, ruined diaper, glasses smeared — and put his hand on the frame where her hand had been, and it wasn't warm, and he stood there in the doorway of the nursery with the bathroom down the hall to his left and the kitchen to his right and the tap still running, and he waited to be told which way to go.

He turned left.

The floorboards were cold. He hadn't known they were cold until his bare feet found them — the nursery had a rug, and the crib had the mattress, and the rest of the house had apparently been holding this small fact in reserve. He stepped out of the doorway and the cold came up through the soles of his feet and into his ankles, and he walked on it anyway, because the tap was still running and the bathroom was the way she'd pointed him and there was nothing in the hall to tell him otherwise.

The dress swung against the backs of his thighs as he walked. The petticoat underneath it was flattened in the back where he'd slept on it, and it rustled wrong — not the crisp flounce from the box, but a tired, crumpled sound, like a paper bag being folded. The hem dragged the floorboards. The tights had gone loose at the knees overnight and they hung there, baggy, and the run at his left knee let the cold in, and the cold sat on that circle of bare skin like a coin.

Halfway down the hall the diaper started to slip.

He stopped and caught it. Both hands, one on each side, hitching the waistband back up onto his hips the way you'd hitch a towel, and the weight of it sagged against his palms, heavy and warm and wrong in a way that had stopped being wrong sometime in the night. The front was soaked through and had gone stiff in patches. The back was worse. He could feel it against his skin, the cold smear of it where it had pressed and dried and pressed again, and his fingers came away from the waistband with a faint tack on them, and he wiped them on the side of the dress without thinking, and then looked at the smear he'd left on the pink cotton and looked at it for a second longer than he needed to.

The hall was longer than it had looked last night. He'd come in through the front door on his hands and knees and hadn't seen any of this — the runner rug he was walking past, faded, with a pattern of leaves worn down to ghosts of themselves; a framed print on the wall, black and white, a woman's back, a camera angle that made the spine a line of light; a coat rack by the door with one coat on it, her coat, dark wool, a scarf looped over the shoulder like something left mid-thought. A pair of her shoes under the rack. Flat, black, scuffed. He looked at the shoes for a second and then at the coat and then at the print, and none of it told him anything, and all of it told him the same thing — that he was in a woman's house, in a woman's hallway, wearing a woman's dress, carrying his own shit in a diaper, and there was nobody here to see it but her.

The tap ran on.

He followed it. Past the coat rack, past a door that was closed — not the nursery door; a different one, and he didn't stop to wonder which room it was, because the not-knowing had a shape to it now and the shape was fine. Past a stretch of wall that had no pictures on it at all, just nail holes, four of them, in a square, where something used to hang. The bathroom door was open. The light inside it was on.

He stopped in the doorway.

It was small. Smaller than his bathroom at home, which wasn't saying much — a sink, a toilet, a tub with a shower curtain drawn most of the way around it, a shelf above the sink with a bar of soap and a folded washcloth on it, exactly where she'd said. A window, high, frosted, with the grey morning pressed against it. The tap was running into the sink, a thin steady stream, and the water had been running long enough that the whole room smelled like it — wet porcelain, cold metal, the mineral smell of city water. She'd left it running for him. Or she'd left it running and walked away and it didn't matter which, because it was running, and he was here, and the sound of it filled the little room from wall to wall.

The bin was by the sink.

He looked at it. It was small — the size of a wastebasket you'd put in a home office, white plastic, a swing lid on top, the kind you step on. There was a foot pedal at the base of it, matte grey, worn shiny at the edge where a foot had gone on and off it a thousand times. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pedal and then at the lid and then at his own hands, which were still holding the waistband of the diaper up at his hips, and he didn't move.

His glasses had fogged a little from the steam. He took them off — one hand, thumb and forefinger on the bridge — and wiped them on the hem of the dress, and put them back on, and the room came back sharper. The tub had a rust stain under the tap. The shower curtain had a pattern of small grey fish on it, faded, the kind of thing you bought in a multipack. The grout between the tiles was grey at the bottom and white at the top. Somebody had lived here a long time. Somebody had taken showers in this tub every morning for years and the tub had the marks to prove it.

He put his hand on the diaper.

Both hands. He found the tapes — what was left of them, the one still stuck to his hip and the other gone soft and curled back on itself — and he peeled the first one off his skin and it came away with a small dry sound, and the diaper went loose in his hands. The second tape gave up without a fight. The whole thing sagged, and he caught it before it hit the floor, both hands under it now, and it was heavier than he'd expected. Heavier than it had felt on his body. That was the thing about weight — you carried it all night and it just was your body, and then you took it in your hands and it was a thing, and the thing weighed what it weighed.

The diaper came apart in his hands. He held it open over the bin — the wet weight of it sagging between his palms, the pulp of it gone dark and clumped in the back — and then he let it drop. It hit the bottom with a sound he felt in his teeth, a soft wet thud, and the swing lid rocked on its hinge and settled. The smell came up out of the bin immediately, freed now, no longer held against his body. He stepped back from it. One step, bare feet on cold tile, and then he just stood there breathing through his mouth while the tap ran.

The bin lid settled. The smell stayed.

He looked down at himself. The dress was still on. The petticoat, the tights, the run at his knee. His hands were tacky where the tapes had been, and there was a smear on the side of the dress from where he'd wiped them in the hall, and another one lower down he hadn't noticed until now — a faint brown streak along the hem, the kind of mark you'd fix with a wet cloth if it were on a shirt you cared about. He didn't care about this. He cared about getting it off, suddenly and all at once, the way you care about a coat when you're finally inside and the rain has stopped being romantic.

The zipper was at the back. He reached over his shoulder and found the tab and pulled, and it came down easy, and the dress went loose around his chest. He shrugged it off his shoulders and let it fall. It hit the tile in a puff of pink and stayed there, the petticoat half inside out, the skirt collapsed on itself, and he stood over it in his tights and his bare chest and looked at the pile for a second like he expected it to do something. It didn't. It was just fabric on a floor.

The tights were worse. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband and peeled them down, and the run at the knee caught and spread, a ladder of it running up his shin before he could stop it, and he had to sit down on the edge of the tub to get them past his ankles. The tile was cold under his ass. His cock was soft and had been soft since he woke, and he didn't look at it, and he didn't look away from it either — it was just there, between his legs, part of the body he was getting out of.

He stood up and stepped into the tub.

The shower curtain was the kind that stuck to wet skin. He pulled it most of the way around and left a gap at the far end so the light came in. He stood in the tub with the cold porcelain under his feet and turned the shower tap. The water came down on him all at once — cold, then warm, then too warm. He turned it back and found a place that was just barely on the hot side, and stood under it and didn't move.

Water ran off his shoulders. It ran down his chest and over his stomach and down his legs and into the drain, and it took the worst of it with it — the tack of the tapes off his fingers, the smear off his hip where the elastic had bitten, the cold dried film on the inside of his thighs. He watched it go. The water at his feet ran brown for a second and then grey and then clear, and he watched the whole transition, and something in his chest went loose by a degree he hadn't known it was holding.

He reached for the soap. The bar was on the shelf where she'd said, next to the folded washcloth, and the soap was the plain kind, no wrapper, a little worn down on one corner from use. He worked up a lather in his hands and started at his face, and the soap stung the corner of his eye where he'd slept on his glasses, and he blinked through it and kept going. Face, neck, behind the ears. The back of the neck was where the worst of it was, he found — the sweat of the night had dried there into a film he hadn't felt until the soap found it, and he scrubbed at it with the flat of his hand until the water ran clean and the skin underneath felt raw and new.

He did his chest. Under his arms. His stomach, where the waistband of the diaper had sat all night and left a red line low across his belly, just above the hair. He soaped that line and stood there a second with his palm flat on it, feeling the raised edge of it under his fingers, the way the skin had been pinched and gone soft and stayed that way.

His cock. He soaped it because it was there and it needed washing, and it stayed soft in his hand, and he didn't make anything of it, and he didn't have to. The soap made it slick and he rinsed it off and moved on. His balls. The crease of his thigh. The backs of his knees. Between his toes, one foot up on the edge of the tub, then the other, and the water came down on the back of his neck the whole time.

Then his ass.

He soaped his hand and reached back and found it — the place where the diaper had pressed and held and pressed again, the place that had taken the worst of it and kept it. He cleaned it properly. He didn't rush it and he didn't linger over it. He cleaned it the way you'd clean a wound, thorough and a little grim, and the soap did its work, and when his fingers came away they came away clean, and he held them under the water and watched the water take the last of it and run clear down the drain.

He stood under the spray and let the hot water hit the back of his neck for a while. His legs were still stiff. His back ached from the mattress. There was a crick in his shoulder from the way he'd slept with his arm hooked over the crib rail, and he rolled it out under the water and felt the joint pop, and it hurt and then it didn't.

He did it all again. She'd said twice, and he did it twice, the whole run of it — face, neck, chest, cock, ass, feet — and the second time was faster because there was less to get off, and by the end of the second pass his skin was pink and hot and the soap was down to a thin worn crescent in his hand. He put it back on the shelf. The washcloth he'd barely used; he'd done most of it with his hands. He wrung it out anyway and hung it over the edge of the tub, because that was what you did, and he stood in the falling water and looked at the frosted window and the grey morning behind it and tried to feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel.

Clean, was what he felt. That was the first layer. Clean, and cold at the edges where the water didn't reach, and hungry in a way he hadn't noticed until the soap smell got into his nose and covered up the room.

Under the clean, the other thing was still there. It hadn't gone down the drain with the water. It sat in his chest where it had sat all night — the thing that had been waiting to be told he'd done well, the thing that had nearly given up in the dark and then hadn't, because she'd said his name from the doorway and told him he had. He stood under the hot water and turned that over. He'd slept in his own shit in a locked crib in a stranger's house, and she'd told him he did well, and the words had landed somewhere in him and stayed there, warm, and he couldn't get them out and he wasn't sure he wanted to.

He turned the water off.

The silence after was total for a second, and then the small sounds came back — the tap in the sink, still running, a drip from the shower head, the clock out in the hall, and somewhere past that, faint, the sound of a kettle going on in the kitchen. A cupboard opening. A mug set down on a counter. She was making coffee. Or tea. The ordinary arithmetic of a woman's morning, one room over, while he stood in her tub with the water dripping off him and nothing to wear.

He put his hand on the shower curtain to push it back and stopped.

The pile of pink was still on the floor where he'd left it. The dress, the petticoat, the tights. He looked at them through the gap in the curtain — the collapsed skirt, the laddered run, the small brown streak on the hem — and then he looked past them at the bathroom door, which was open, and the hall beyond it, which was empty, and the towel situation, which was that there was no towel. There was a bar on the wall by the sink with nothing on it. There was a hook on the back of the door with nothing on it. She'd told him about the soap and the cloth and the shower, twice, and she hadn't told him about a towel, and he stood in the tub with the water cooling on his skin and understood that this was on purpose.

He waited. He gave it a minute, then another, standing in the tub with his hands on the curtain, water beading on his shoulders and running down his back. The kettle noise went on in the kitchen. No footsteps came down the hall. She wasn't coming. She'd put him in the room with the soap and the cloth and the tap and left the towel out of the list, and now he got to decide what to do about it, and the deciding was the point.

He reached down and picked up the petticoat.

It was the least ruined of the three. He shook it out over the tub and the worst of the crumbs fell away, and then he held it up and looked at it — white, thin, the netting gone soft from the wash of his body all night, a flounce at the hem that had been crisp in the box and wasn't now. He pressed it to his face anyway. It didn't smell like the diaper. It smelled like soap and wet cotton and, faintly, like the back of his own neck after a night's sleep, and that was all, and he dried his face on it, and then his chest, and then he used it on his legs and his feet and stood on it to get the last of the water off his soles.

It was not a towel. It worked like one.

He stepped out of the tub and stood on the cold tile with the petticoat bunched in his fist, and he looked at the dress on the floor and the tights beside it, and he crouched down and picked the tights up and turned them over in his hands. The run had opened all the way up the shin now. There was no putting them back on without it becoming a different kind of run, and he held them a second and then folded them and set them on the edge of the sink, and he picked up the dress and shook it out and held it in front of himself and looked at the smear on the hem.

He heard the cupboard again. A drawer. The click of a lighter, maybe, or a spoon on a saucer. She was having her morning one room away and she was not hurrying and she was not calling down the hall to ask how the shower was, and the not-calling was its own kind of instruction.

He put the dress on.

The zipper was at the back and he got it most of the way up by feel, one arm bent behind him, and the last two inches he couldn't reach and left open. The dress hung on him, damp from the steam and cold against his skin, and the petticoat he'd dried himself with he stepped back into and pulled up and the whole thing rustled wrong again, the tired paper-bag sound, and he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

His hair was wet and flat to his head. His glasses had fogged again and he wiped them on the hem of the dress, the clean part, and put them back on, and the man in the mirror came into focus. Pink dress. White petticoat showing at the hem. Bare legs, the tights folded on the sink behind him. A red line across his belly, a red line across the back of his hand, his face washed and pink and younger than it had any business looking. No diaper. Nothing under the dress at all.

He stood there and looked at the man in the mirror and the man in the mirror looked back, and the kettle went quiet in the kitchen, and then he heard her footsteps in the hall, slow, unhurried, coming toward the bathroom door.

He didn't move. He stood at the sink with his hands on the porcelain and watched the doorway in the mirror, and the footsteps came up the floorboards and stopped, and there she was — in the mirror, in the frame of the door, the silk robe still loose at the waist, a mug in one hand, steam coming off it. She looked at the back of him in the mirror. She took in the open zipper, the two inches he couldn't reach, the folded tights on the sink, the petticoat hem hanging wet and heavy below the dress. She looked at all of it the way she'd looked at the room that morning, and then she looked at the bin by the sink, and then she looked at him.

"You found the bin," she said.

"Yes."

"And the soap."

"Twice."

She came one step into the room. The mug steamed in her hand and she held it near her chin and didn't drink from it. Her hair was still down. The mole by her eyebrow was still there. She looked at his bare legs and then at the folded tights and then at the open zipper at the back of the dress, and she didn't comment on any of it, and the not-commenting was the comment.

"There's a towel on the back of the nursery door," she said. "You didn't look."

He hadn't. He'd come down the hall with his hands full of diaper and he hadn't looked at the back of the door he'd walked out of, and she knew that, and he knew she knew, and there was nothing to say to it that wasn't an excuse.

"No," he said. "I didn't."

"Mm." She took a sip of the coffee at last. She swallowed, and her eyes came back up to him and stayed there, and he felt the whole room narrow down to the two of them and the mug and the folded tights and the dress he'd put back on wet. "Come to the kitchen when you've finished in here. There's something on the table for you."

She turned and went. He listened to the footsteps go back down the hall, five, four, and the small domestic sounds resumed — the mug down on a surface, a chair pulled out, the rustle of something paper being set straight. The nursery door was behind him and to the left, out in the hall, and the towel was on the back of it, and he turned and looked at his own reflection one more time and then walked out of the bathroom and down the hall to the nursery to get it.

The towel was there. Grey, folded over the top of the door, and he took it and pressed it to his face and it smelled like nothing, like clean cotton and a cupboard, and he held it there a second longer than he needed to and then carried it back and hung it on the bar by the sink where it should have gone in the first place.

Then he went to the kitchen.

She was sitting at a small table by a window, the robe crossed now and belted, her hands wrapped around the mug. There was a second mug on the table opposite her, and it was full, and it was for him. Beside it, squared to the edge of the table, was a white envelope with his name on it in the neat small hand he knew from the cards in the box, and beside the envelope, laid out flat and parallel to the table edge, was a thick pink diaper with a pattern of bunnies on it, and a fresh pair of white tights, and a small round tin of something with no label.

He stood in the doorway and looked at the table. The coffee steamed. The kettle ticked as it cooled on the stove. She didn't say anything, and she didn't push the chair out for him, and she didn't tell him to sit. She just watched him from across the table with her hands around the mug, and waited, the way she'd waited all night and all morning, and let him do the arithmetic of the table himself.