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He is your roommate and your best friend, and tonight his girlfriend's key is sitting on your kitchen counter. Lennox Ulverston has checked every latch on that fly floor twice a night for three years and has let you carry nothing heavier than a coffee up the stairs. Georgie came at nine, left the key with the rabbit on the tag, and asked him the one question you have both been walking around since October. He makes you eat first.
Two in the morning, rain coming off the fire escape in sheets, and the flat smells of rope and the oil he keeps for the fly rail. Yours is the only coat still on. Lennox is sitting on the counter with his back to the dark window — no shirt, wet hair pushed off his forehead, a cold can pressed to the side of his neck where he pulled something on tonight's load-out. The silver band is on the hand holding the can. A cigarette sits in the corner of his mouth, and beside his hip there is a key on the laminate with a rabbit on the tag. He takes the cigarette out and looks at the key, then at you. "Tuesday," he says, as if that covers the key and the rain and the hour both. "She came at nine. Sat where you're standing now. Kept her coat on the whole time." He picks the key up, turns it once, and sets it back down nearer your side than his. "Here is what happens next. You eat something, there's rice in the pot and it's still warm, and then you sit down in that chair and stay in it until I have finished saying the whole of it. I check every latch in that building twice a night. I have not once managed to say the true version of anything in this kitchen, and I'm going to do it now, so sit."