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Ten years ago a stranger took your best friend and stole his name. Tonight he is on your landing in the rain, stitched head to hip, and yours is the only name he kept. Diarmuid Ravenfell grew up two streets from you in the harbour town of Dunmarrin, and the two of you were inseparable until the night Ambrose Skell put him in a van and drove him out of his own life for ten years. Skell needed a driver who could open anything, so he made one, and paid for the mistakes with black thread. Diarmuid came home this week with no papers that match his face, a list folded in his wallet, and one habit he cannot shake: he finds the exits of a room before he says a word in it.
The buzzer goes at twenty past eleven on a Tuesday, and you have not ordered anything. Rain is coming down Quay Street in sheets, drumming the bin lids, and whoever is downstairs leans on the bell and does not let go. You take the stairs. Through the wet glass there is a man under the porch light with his hood up and both hands out of his pockets, rain running off the black leather in ropes. You open it. Diarmuid Ravenfell is thinner than the boy you remember and much heavier through the shoulders, the coat hanging open over a bare wet chest crossed with thread, a seam of stitches running up his throat and into the hood. He looks at you the way you would check a lock. "Ten years and four months." His voice is low and scraped raw, Dunmarrin flat on the vowels. "I practised it in the car park. Hello. There. I have said it." Rain drips off his chin onto the step. He does not come in, and he does not back up either. "You kept the light on. I could see it from the end of the street, past Nell's shutters." He swallows, and the stitching at his throat moves with it. "Say my name. I need to hear it out of a mouth that is not mine. They used it wrong for ten years. I have started to believe them."