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“I fogged the window.”

I open my eyes and look. He did. You can’t see the firs at all.

“Does that happen a lot?”

“It’s never happened,” he says. “Not once.”

Afterward, I lie in the middle of his huge gray bed, and he lies beside me, on his side, with one arm across my stomach. The window’s clearing slowly from the edges. The air from outside is cool and smells like rain on fir needles.

There’s a thump in the hall. Then the click of nails on hardwood, unhurried, and Billy Bob appears in the doorway with his moose blanket in his mouth.

He drops it on the rug at the foot of the bed. He arranges it with his nose. He turns around three times, lies down on it, sighs enormously, and within thirty seconds he’s snoring.

Merek lifts his head and looks at him over my body.

“He snores,” he says.

“He’s a basset hound. That’s what they do.”

“He sounds like a truck downshifting.”

“You get used to it.”

“I have lived through two world wars,” Merek says, “and that is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard come out of a dog.”

But he gets up. He gets up naked and enormous and still faintly glowing, and pads to the foot of the bed, and crouches. He straightens the corner of the moose blanket that’s folded under Billy Bob’s back leg. He gets the water bowl from the hall and puts it on the floor by the dog’s nose. Then he goes back out and comes back with the ramp, unfolds it, and sets it against the side of the bed. He pushes down on it with one hand to make sure the bolt holds.

Billy Bob doesn’t wake up. He goes on snoring.

Merek comes back to bed. He lies down on his back and pulls me against his side, and I put my head on his chest. It’s too hot. I don’t move.

“You did that like it was nothing,” I say.

“What?”

“The water. The ramp.”

He thinks about it. “He lives here,” he says, and closes his eyes.

His tail comes over the edge of the bed and lies across my legs. The lines across his chest dim down to a slow, sleepy orange.

I lie there and listen to my dog snore and my demon breathe, and the window clears, and outside the firs start to go gray at the tips.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

I reach over Merek’s chest for it without lifting my head. It’s 5:14. Probably William, with the keycard list. Probably Lenart, telling me in complete sentences that I should be asleep.

It’s not either of them.

It’s a number I don’t recognize. No name. A picture message.

I open it.

It’s my car.

My Corolla, parked in the far corner of the Club’s back lot, nose in, behind the white delivery van, in the spot where it’s been sitting since the Solstice. It’s daylight in the picture. The asphalt is dry. My black Lucky’s T-shirt and two pairs of my socks are hooked over the top of the rear passenger window to dry, the way I hung them on Sunday afternoon after I washed them in a sink in the staff room at the club. I took them down before the Club opened that night.

I only did that once. The next day, Merek found me in the rain, and I haven’t slept in that car since.