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“I should be there.”

“You almost died tonight. Let them do their jobs.”

I want to argue, but he's right. I pull out a stool and sit down.

“Extra cheese,” I tell him.

“Already planned on it.”

He lays the sandwich in the pan. It hisses. He stands at his stove with his horns almost brushing the range hood and lets me be furious at the back of his head.

So I am. I use every cuss word I know. I take my hair down, because the tie is giving me a headache, and then I’m standing in Merek’s kitchen at a quarter to four in the morning in my socks with my hair half braided, and I run out of words.

He slides the grilled cheese onto a plate, cuts it corner to corner, and puts it in front of me.

I sit on one of the tall stools at the island and eat. It’s perfect. It’s crisp and too hot, and I burn the roof of my mouth on the first bite and don’t care.

Merek leans on the counter across from me with a glass of water. He’s quiet. I didn’t know he could be quiet.

Over his shoulder, through the doorway to the living room, I can see Billy Bob asleep on his moose blanket, and beside him, folded flat against the wall, his ramp.

I look at it.

The hinge doesn’t have a twist tie on it anymore. There’s a bolt through it now, a real one, with a washer and a nut, the kind you’d buy at a hardware store if you noticed a twist tie on a dog ramp and thought about it later.

“When did you fix the ramp?”

Merek glances over his shoulder. “Tuesday.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“It was a bolt.” He shrugs. “It took four minutes.”

I put the sandwich down.

There’s a bag of Billy Bob’s prescription food in the pantry. The big one, the twenty-pound bag, the one I’ve been not buying for three weeks because the small bags were what I could afford. I noticed it yesterday when I went in for coffee filters, and I didn’t say anything, because I was going to buy it myself today. My first paycheck clears today. I had the bag picked out.

My boots are on his couch. Nobody’s going to steal them.

“I like my life,” I say.

Merek looks at me.

“That’s the problem.” I pick at the crust. “A week ago I was sleeping in a Corolla with my dog and a credit card I couldn’t pay off. I had nothing anybody could take. I didn’t even have a bed for anybody to take.” I hear my voice getting thick and I hate it, so I make it hard instead. “And now I have a job I’m good at, and I have breakfast at eleven every day with a guy who makes his own grenadine, and I have a dog with a bolt in his ramp. And somebody keeps trying to take it, and I’m so mad, Merek.”

He sets the water glass down.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know you are.”

He reaches across the island and takes the plate, which is empty, and puts it in the sink, and I sit there with my hands in my lap and let my eyes sting until they stop.

When he turns back around, the ember lines along his forearms have dimmed to a low, steady orange.

“Can I tell you about the freezer?” he says.

I nod.

He doesn’t come around the island. He stays where he is, with the counter between us, and turns the empty glass in his fingers.