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But I've watched him for a long time now, in the steam of a dye house and the glare of a conference room and the half-dark of every bedroom we've shared, and I know the exact moment a sound reaches him. His eyes don't move. His jaw does.

"The numbers look good," he says brightly. "Eleven percent over last year. I think we can talk about a second dye lot in the spring."

"Mm," I say.

Plink.

"It's a pleasure to see the Blue holding its margin," says Roman. "I might have Dolores walk me through the loom schedule next Friday. Not that there's any need. I only like to be informed."

"Of course."

His pen taps the table once, twice. He sets it down, straightens it parallel to the edge of the laptop, picks it up again.

He looks at the salt shaker and moves it two inches to the left. I take a very slow sip of tea and check the stove clock over the rim of my mug. I'm a woman who counts and I'm counting.

Plink.

He looks at the ceiling, looks at his own hands. He breathes in through his nose the way he does at the end of a long board call, and I watch him fight with it, a grown man in a good sweatshirt, a man who has talked down hostile investors and held a nine-year-old's trust on his knees and risked his own career to say no to a spreadsheet. He is white-knuckling a faucet.

Four minutes, by the stove clock.

"Rosey."

"Mm?"

"Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"That."

I tip my head as if I'm listening. The drop falls on cue and I wince in sympathy. "Oh. That."

"You did something to it."

"I did not."

"Rosemary."

"I may have swapped a washer. With my father's wrench."

"Why?" He looks genuinely wounded. "Why would you do that? I promised, I promised you, I've been so careful, four days, Rosey, I've sat in rooms where things were crooked—"

"You were standing in the bathroom last night looking at the grout like it owed you money."

"It's poorly applied."

"I know it is." I lean forward across the table and put my chin in my hand. "You're going to go out of your mind. You're going to start fixing the neighbors' furnaces. I thought I'd save us the trouble."

"I was trying to be better."

"You are better." I mean it so much that it comes out rough. "That's not the point. You were never broken, Roman. You're only happiest when you're useful and I'm tired of making you pretend you aren't." I push my chair back and get up, in my robe and my slippers, and I cross to the sink with my heart doing something ridiculous. I put one hand on the faucet and turn to look at him. "So I'm asking."

His face changes. I've watched a great many expressions cross it. This one's slow and astonished and entirely unguarded.

"Roman Caldwell," I say. "Would you please fix my sink?"

For a moment he doesn't move at all.