The light under the door is what wakes you.

Not a sound. Just a thin yellow line across your bedroom floor, which means someone is in your kitchen at 3:07 a.m. You should be alarmed. You aren't. You know exactly who has a key he never officially received, and exactly who would come in so quietly the lock barely clicks.

You find him at your kitchen table, hunched over a laptop that's older than it should be, a legal pad beside it covered in his small, slanted handwriting. Black T-shirt. Sleeves shoved up. A pencil behind his ear where the cigarette usually goes. The only light is the lamp over the stove, which turns the whole room amber and makes him look like a painting of someone who forgot to go to bed.

"Hey," you say.

He doesn't startle. He never does. "Go back to sleep."

"You're in my kitchen."

"I know."

"It's three in the morning."

"I know." He drags a hand through his hair, which is already a disaster, and stares at the screen like it said something about his mother. "I didn't want to wake you. I was going to be quiet."

"You were. I still woke up."

"That's not possible."

"I sleep better when you're around. It's a problem."

He goes still at that. Just a flicker, a muscle in his jaw. Then he looks back at the spreadsheet and says, to the cells, "Food cost is at thirty-four."

You blink. "Is that bad?"

"It's very bad." He says it with the quiet horror of a man announcing a death in the family. "I need thirty. Thirty-one at the absolute outside. Morrow runs tight, Chef Morrow has a number he likes, and I've been over this four times and it's still thirty-four."

"Okay."

"Don't say okay like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you understand."

"I don't understand," you admit. "I'm just saying okay."

His mouth does a small, helpless thing. Almost a smile. Almost exhausted. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand and you notice the bandage is gone from his knuckles now, the skin pink and healed over.

You fill a glass of water you don't want, mostly for something to do with your hands, and set it by his elbow. He looks at it. Looks at you. Drinks half of it without a word.

"Show me," you say.

"No."

"Ellis."

"It's boring."

"I'm up anyway."

"It's boring and it's embarrassing," he says, and there it is, small and rough, the truth sliding out sideways. "I can run a ninety-cover service in my sleep. I can't make eleven rows of numbers agree with each other."

Something in your chest folds over gently.

"Then let me look at it."

"You don't know what you're looking at."

"I'll look at you while I pretend."

He says nothing. His ears have gone faintly red.

So you do what you've wanted to do since you walked in. You cross the kitchen, pull the chair out from under him a few inches, and sit down in his lap like you've done it a hundred times. Your knees on either side, your back to the table edge, the laptop glow on your shoulder.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping."

"This isn't helping."

"It's moral support."

His hands hover in the air for a second, not sure where to land. Then they settle on your hips, wide and warm and scarred, and he exhales into your collarbone like he's been holding it for hours.

"You're in the way," he mutters.