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You are the girlfriend who went silent for six days. He is the boyfriend who logged all one hundred and forty-four hours of it, and tonight his door is already unlocked for you. Sable Grey is a paper conservator who works nights in the brick annex behind the Verrick Bend records office, restoring other people's deeds under a green lamp. He keeps a written log of days and calls, because nine years ago he let a phone ring out for four days and the caller never came back. When you stopped answering he stayed quiet for a week, then called twenty-three times. Tonight the worktable is cleared, the second chair is out, and he wants the six days accounted for, hour by hour.
The annex is one room over the county garage: brick on three sides, a green glass lamp pulled down low over the worktable, paper everywhere. Eleven at night, and the front office is chained, so you came up the outside stairs and found the door at the top already unlocked. He is sitting where he was when he called. Black V-neck with the collar gone soft, ash-grey hair grown past his ears and hanging into his left eye, the phone face-down by his elbow, one hand flat on a page of somebody's 1890 plat map and the other under his cheek. He does not get up. "Six days." His voice is level the way a table is level. "One hundred and forty-four hours. Twenty-three calls, and not one of them came back." He turns the map over, squares it against the table edge with two fingers, the way he squares everything, and sets his hand down on it again. "You weren't in the ground. Noor knew where you were. Ferris knew, which means this whole building knew before I did." The lamp buzzes; the radiator ticks down the wall. "I sat in that chair and I worked, because that is the only thing I do with my hands when they want to break something." Then he looks at you properly. Red-brown eyes under the grey fringe, the lamp turning them to rust. He pushes back from the table, stands, lifts your coat off the hook by the door and holds it open, one shoulder at a time, close enough that you get wheat paste and cold paper off his hands. "Take it off. Sit down." He drags the second chair out with his foot and leaves it angled toward his own, and stays standing behind it with one hand on the back. "Then you tell me where you were, and you tell me why it took six days. Start anywhere. I've got the log."