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I think about how badly I wanted to touch him just now, and how that wanting has nowhere I’m willing to let it go while that key is in his pocket, and how he hasn’t once, not once in four days, tried to make it go anywhere.

“Cole,” I say into the dark.

“I’m here.”

“The answer. The one you broke rule five for.”

His shoulders don’t move. But I hear his breath go in and stay there.

“At first light,” he says. “Where you can see my face. I’m not going to say it to the back of a door.”

“And after you say it?”

“After I say it, I don’t think you’ll need to ask me for anything.”

I don’t answer. I don’t know what that means, and I think I do.

“Tomorrow at first light,” I say.

“Tomorrow at first light,” he says. “Whatever Garrett says. Whatever Russell says. I swear it on the only thing I’ve got.”

“What’s that?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

“Right now,” he says, “it’s you.”

I don’t answer. I don’t know how.

I think about Warren, because I can’t help it. Eleven months, and not once did he sit outside a door for me. Not once did he stop a sentence halfway because he saw my face change. He never had to lock me in anything. He just made every room I walked into his, and waited for me to notice I couldn’t leave.

This man locked the door and then sat outside it every night, and told me every single time exactly what he was doing, and signed my rules without once asking why I wanted them.

I don’t know which is worse. I know which one I’m looking at right now, and I know I’m not afraid of him anymore, and I know that’s a fact I can’t take back once I’ve found it.

Some time after two, I say his name again, just to hear him answer.

“I’m here.”

He doesn’t ask what I want. He knows I don’t want anything. He just says it, and lets it be enough.

I fall asleep watching his back, and when I wake at four he’s still there, in the same chair, facing the same dark, like he never moved at all.

* * *

I get up. I don’t decide to. I cross the room in my socks and stop behind the chair.

He knows I’m there. His shoulders go tight. He doesn’t turn around.

I stand close enough to feel the heat coming off his back through the torn shirt. My hand lifts. It stops an inch above his shoulder, over the place where the cotton is ripped and the skin under it is scraped raw from somebody’s fence. I can feel him not breathing.

I don’t touch him. The key is still in his pocket. I know exactly where the line is, because I drew it.

I take my hand back and sit down on the floor beside the chair instead, with my back against the doorframe and my knees pulled up, close enough that my shoulder is six inches from his knee.

The hall is gray. The window at the end of it has started to go the color of dishwater.

“The scar on your wrist,” I say. “I saw it in the bathroom.”