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He thinks about it. “A business partner is giving you a ride.”

“A business partner.”

“You own part of the business,” he says. “I own part of the business.”

That gets a laugh out of me, a tired one. He looks pleased with himself, and then he goes quiet again, and I notice what he’s doing.

He’s driving very carefully. He slows down for every curve, long before he needs to. He’s checked the heater twice, and he’s adjusted the vent on my side so it blows on my hands instead of my face. When I shift in my seat, he looks over to see why.

“Don’t do that,” I say.

“Do what?”

“Drive like I’m a carton of eggs. I’m the same person I was at the bar.”

“I know you are.”

“So treat me the same.”

He’s quiet for the length of a curve. “I’m going to treat you like someone who’s had a long night,” he says. “That’s the only promise I’m going to make you. I don’t make the ones I can’t keep.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I look out the window.

His hands are huge on the steering wheel, charcoal-gray in the dashboard light. I remember those hands wrapped around mine in the office off the kitchen, holding still and letting the heat do the work. I remember the way his thumb moved on the back of my hand.

I can call it a bed and a business partner as many times as I want. I’m still going home with him, and he makes me feel things I’m not ready to look at.

His phone buzzes in the cupholder. He glances at the screen and doesn’t pick it up.

The house is at the end of a long gravel drive under fir trees, built low and long, out of dark wood and gray stone. A light is on over the porch. The rain sounds different here, softer, coming down through branches.

He carries Billy Bob in. I walk, in my unlaced boots, because it’s six steps.

The front door is taller than any door I’ve ever walked through, and so is every doorway after it. Inside, the house is warm, and quiet, and it smells like cedar and coffee.

I don’t know what I expected. Black walls, maybe. Skulls.

Instead, there’s a big room with a stone fireplace at one end. A couch long enough to sleep a family. A leather chair so deep and wide that I’d sink into it like a bathtub. A wall of windows, black right now, with the shapes of trees beyond them. And books. One whole wall is shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves are full and messy in the way that means someone reads them. Paperbacks lie sideways on top of hardbacks. A coffee mug is sitting on one shelf where somebody forgot it.

Through a doorway, I can see a kitchen with a cast-iron pan on the stove and a pot of basil on the windowsill, a kitchen somebody cooks in.

“You run hot,” I say, looking at the fireplace. “What do you need a fire for?”

“I don’t need it.” He sets Billy Bob down on the rug. “I like it.”

I drift over to the shelves while Merek goes back out for my things. Near the bottom, there’s a row of cocktail books, some of them old enough that their spines have cracked and been taped. Next to them is a long row of black three-ring binders. Each one is labeled on the spine in the same neat, square handwriting. Club, 1934–1939. Club, 1940–1944. All the way up through the decades.

I pull one out and open it. Inside are recipes, page after page, written by hand. Some of them are crossed out and rewritten. Next to one, in the margin, he’s written too sweet, Aurelian hates it, and underlined hates twice.

“Those are rough drafts,” Merek says from the doorway. He has my duffel in one hand and the ramp in the other.

“There are ninety years of rough drafts.”

“I’m a slow writer.”

I put it back carefully.

He shows me down the hall to a bedroom with a queen bed, a white duvet, a reading lamp, and a window full of trees. There’s a bathroom across from it with a stack of folded towels already on the counter. The door has a lock on the inside. He shows it to me without making a point of it, just turns it once so I can see that it works.