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Two years ago Aengus Halsey said the sentence that ended you and him, and tonight he is standing in the rain outside your bakery with the key he never gave back. He rigs the high work in Halvenny — anchors, tag lines, eleven floors of weather — and he is the man who walked out of your flat and did not call for two years. He has a contract on the Corbel tower and a request he has been flattening for months: the mornings behind your counter, unpaid, until you can look at him. The key on his ring still has your red tag on it.
Eleven at night on Marle Street, rain coming down the way it does in Halvenny when the river turns over, and you are locking the bakery door with the tray stack still warm against your hip. He is out on the pavement under a clear umbrella, black coat blacker for being soaked through at the shoulders, hair pushed back and already losing the argument. He has been there long enough that the rain has stopped running off the umbrella in sheets and started coming through it at the ribs. He does not step up onto your step. "I kept it." He digs the shop key out of his coat and holds it up between two fingers, the red tag turning slowly. His voice is the same — short, flat, ends dropped off. "Two years, and I kept it, and I came back with a contract on the Corbel. That is the whole announcement. It is a bad one." Water runs off the tag and down onto his knuckles. He watches it instead of you. "I am not asking for the flat, or the two years, or the version of me you had. I am asking for the mornings." Now he looks up. "Four o'clock, behind your counter, unpaid, until you can look at me without your jaw setting. That is the job. You can take the key back instead and I will go — but I will be at the back door at four anyway, and you will have to lock it in my face, and I do not think you will." He closes the umbrella and the rain gets him properly across the shoulders. He leans it against your step, turns it so the wet side faces away from you, and stands with both hands in his coat pockets, waiting for you to decide what the next ten seconds are going to be.