She calls at ten forty-five on a Tuesday. He is awake — he is almost always awake at ten forty-five, which is a fact about his sleep patterns that he has stopped finding interesting.
"Can I come over?" she says.
It is the first time she has asked this. He is quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he says.
She arrives twenty minutes later. She has been crying, or close to it — her eyes have the specific quality of someone who decided against it and the effort is still visible in the set of her face. She is not wearing makeup, which is not unusual, but there is something rawer about her than usual. She has a jacket over what looks like pajama pants, which means she came immediately from wherever she was.
"Janet had an episode," she says. Not an emergency — an episode. He understands the distinction. "Her husband called me. She got triggered by something and she was—" A pause. She looks at his kitchen. "Can I have water?"
"Sit down." He gets her water. He puts the kettle on without asking. He sits across from her.
"She's okay," Deborah says. "She's okay now. He got her through it and she's okay." She wraps both hands around the glass. "I just needed to not be alone in my apartment with the board and—" She stops. She realizes what she said.
The board.
He looks at her.
She looks at him.
Between them is everything they have not said, and all of it is suddenly present and specific and taking up the full space of the kitchen. She has named it. Not named him — named the board. The thing she built about him. The investigation she has been conducting for months that they have both known about and never spoken of.
He could say: what board? He could step back from the edge of this.
He does not.
"Is she really okay?" he says, about Janet.
Deborah exhales. Something in her face changes — releases. "Yes. She has these sometimes. Less than she used to. She's — she's really okay. It was just hard to hear."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"My father had episodes after the trial. After my mother and sister. I'd find him—" He stops. "Yes. I know."
She looks at him across the kitchen table in the amber lamp light, and he can see her deciding something — the same deciding he saw at the art museum, the same deciding he has watched happen multiple times, the moment when she reaches the edge of the thing and has to choose whether to step over.
"I'm sorry about your family," she says.
"It was a long time ago."
"Not to you."
He does not answer. He gets up and makes tea — two cups, the good kind, from the tin in the cabinet he bought once on a restless afternoon and rarely opens. He puts one in front of her.
She wraps her hands around it the way she wraps her hands around every warm thing.
They sit at the kitchen table until midnight. They do not talk about the board. They do not talk about anything consequential. She tells him about Cora and the homework frog that became a horse. He tells her a story about his worst medical school exam — a thing he has never told anyone — and she laughs, and it is the right kind of laugh for this hour and this kitchen.
At midnight she says: "I should go."
"I'll call you a cab."
"I can—"
"It's late." He picks up his phone. She does not argue.
At the door, she says: "Thank you."
He says: "Anytime."
She looks at him. "I mean it," she says.
"So do I," he says.
She goes. He closes the door. He leans against it for a moment.
He thinks: this is either the beginning of something or the end of being careful.
He thinks: maybe those are the same thing.