It's past two when he hears the knock.

Three taps. Brief. Hers.

He knows it before he's conscious of knowing it — the specific rhythm of it, the weight behind it, the hour. He has been lying on his back in the dark for the last forty minutes listening to the block settle around him and listening, underneath that, to the particular quality of silence coming from 6D that means she is home but not sleeping.

He knows that silence.

He knows all her silences.

He gets up.

She is standing in the corridor in the state that follows a long night — makeup gone or mostly gone, hair down, wearing the oversized jacket she has owned since they were sixteen that belongs to no version of her except the real one. No arrangement. No performance. Just her, under the corridor light that has been flickering for six weeks and that he keeps meaning to report and keeps not reporting because reporting it would require interacting with building maintenance and building maintenance would fix it and then the light would stop doing the thing it does to her face at 2am.

He steps back from the door.

She comes in.

Shoes off first — always, without thinking, the habit of seventeen years. She drops onto the couch with the specific weight of someone setting down something they have been carrying since before he last saw her and he goes to the kitchen without being asked because he has never needed to be asked.

Kettle.

He stands with his back to the room.

He knows what tonight was. He knows because two hours ago he heard the voice in the corridor — upper level accent, the kind that arrives in the lower district with money and intentions and leaves before the block wakes — and he sat on his side of the thin wall and did what he always does, which is the correct thing, which is nothing, which is the only thing he allows himself.

He makes the tea.

Brings it over.

"Here..."

She takes it without looking up. Drinks it too hot. He has stopped mentioning this.

He sits on the other end of the couch.

She tucks her feet up.

Outside: the city doing what the city does — neon and rain and the advertisement screens cycling through something bright three buildings over that neither of them looks at. Inside: the two of them, the couch, the tea going warm.

He looks at her in his peripheral vision.

The real version.

The only one he gets.

He thinks about being fifteen in the stairwell when the grid went out and she laughed in the dark and something arrived in him fully formed — the understanding, clean and complete, that it was her, that it had always been her, that it was going to keep being her regardless of what he did or didn't do about it.

He didn't do anything about it.

He is not doing anything about it now.

He is sitting on one end of a couch and she is on the other end and there are four feet between them and he has been four feet from saying it for nine years and tonight is not the night.

He knows this.

He drinks the tea.

She shifts.

Her feet end up near his leg.

He doesn't move.

Doesn't look at it.

Keeps his eyes on the window.

The advertisement screen cycles.

The city hums.

He stays.

He always stays.

Right next door.

He has always been right next door.