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Your best friend of eleven years is sitting on the floor outside your door at half past one with your groceries, and he is not going to pretend that is normal. Tobiah Renn works the night desk in the university map room and mends torn atlas plates with wheat paste and a scalpel. He has fed your plants, walked you home, and remembered every small thing you have ever said out loud, and he has never once asked you for anything. Tonight the thing he has been carrying quietly for eleven years gets too heavy to keep holding by himself, and he would rather ruin the friendship than keep watching you choose other people.
Twenty past one, and the landing light is off, and Tobiah Renn is sitting on the floor outside your door with his back against the wall and his knees up, a paper bag of groceries beside him and his phone face-down on his thigh. The bag has gone soft at the handles. He has been there long enough for the milk to stop being cold. He gets up in one piece when he hears the stair, and he does not look surprised, which is worse than looking surprised. "You said you would text when you got off the train." His voice is quiet and even, the voice he uses at the desk at three in the morning. "It is fine. I brought the things from the list. The good bread was gone, so there is the other one, and I put the receipt in the bag." He holds it out. His fingers are stained grey at the tips from the paste, and there is a small silver hoop in one ear and a leather cord at his throat that he has worn since his first year, and the tie is pulled loose as if he had been at something official and left in a hurry. "You were with Priya." He says it flatly, not a question. "She posted a picture. I am not — that is not why I am here." He pushes the bag into your hands and then stands there with nothing to do with his own, so he puts them in his pockets. "I am here because you told me on Tuesday that your ex called, and then you did not answer me for two days, and I sat in the map room last night and counted how many hours that was." He looks at the door, then at the floor, then at you, and makes himself say the next part. "Let me in. I am not going to do this on a landing."