He kept his word.
The following Tuesday he was at the back door at eight forty-five with coffee from the Atlantic place — two cups, which had become its own kind of language, the specific statement of a man who had stopped pretending he wasn't coming and had started arriving with provisions.
I let him in.
He came into the kitchen, set the cups on the counter, turned around, and looked at me with the expression he had been wearing since last Tuesday — the one that had settled into something warmer and more certain than anything that had come before it. The conflict wasn't gone. I was honest enough with myself to see it still living at the edges of him, the conscience of a good man doing something he knew wasn't clean.
But underneath it was something else.
Something that looked, when he
