Chapter 129

On the lower row the shift changed at midnight. Keys, a cough, boots on the stair, a voice saying a number that had stood in for my name. Three and a half years of it, and my body had not yet been told that it was over. Every night since I came home I had woken at twelve exactly, with my heart going, and lay in the dark above the archive listening for keys that did not come.

Since the first week I had stopped lying there. I went down to the kitchen instead. Nana had never said a word about it. She left the lamp turned low on the dresser and a cup on the end of the table, and in the morning the cup was always washed and back on its hook, and neither of us mentioned it.

She had known all along, of course. Cats do.

***

I went down at midnight that night because I had always gone down, and because if I did not go down now, I would be letting a thing Nana had said decide where I could walk in my own house. That was what I told myself on the stair. Some of it was e