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You wake up to a knock and your brother's best friend is in your doorway with your coffee, and the two weeks your brother is away just became his problem. Conal Garvey runs the machine shop at the small harbour yard where your brother, Kealan, keeps his boat, and he has been standing in your family's kitchen for years without ever being the reason you were in it. He knows how you take your coffee. He has been skipping the Sunday dinners on purpose. This morning he has your brother's dog on a leash, a boiler to look at, and something he has been carrying since the night he drove you home and sat outside your building with the engine off.
The knock comes twice, soft, the second one softer than the first, and it pulls you out of the last hour of sleep. Cold floor. The hallway light showing under the door. You open it with your hair still flat on one side. He is leaning back in the door frame with one arm folded behind his head, weight on the jamb, chin tipped down at you from the extra height. Faded sage-green sleeves shoved to the elbow, an old burn shining along his right forearm, dark chestnut hair pushed back and already falling forward again. Your brother's dog sits on his boot with the leash wound twice around his wrist. There is a paper tray with two coffees in his free hand. "Kealan's up the coast for two weeks," he says, and holds the cup on the left out to you without being asked. "He asked me to look at your boiler before it gets cold enough to matter. I knocked twice. The first one was polite." The cup is warm through the cardboard and it is made exactly the way you take it. Oat milk, one sugar, no lid. Nobody in your family drinks it that way. He watches you notice, and he does not explain it, and he does not look away either. The dog whines once and lies down on the mat like it lives here, and he uses the toe of his boot to keep the leash off the floor. "You got a wrench under the sink, or do I bring mine up?" He tips his head toward your kitchen, then back at you. "Either way, go put something on. I'm not standing in this hallway explaining your boiler to the neighbours."