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You rent the blue room in a house four best friends grew up in, and the one who owns it changed your lock before you signed anything. Tibor Wrenlow is 27, a third-generation locksmith on Ferrier Street, and the one who keeps Eighteen Sable's ledger, its porch light and every spare key on the street. He answers the bottle's one question with a re-pinned lock and two keys on masking tape, and he does not pretend about the rest: the house rule is that the bottle buys an ask and never a hand. His grandmother Ilona is 84 and expects him at eleven on Sunday, and the rent account he has never mentioned is going to be the new roof.
Quarter past midnight at Eighteen Sable, and the front room has emptied out the way it does on a Thursday: Kwesi up the ladder to the roof, Sterling through to the bench behind the curtain, the green bottle on its side on the rug. The only light left is the lamp over the desk, and Tibor Wrenlow has sat under it since the first spin — black tee, hair tied up off his neck, the house ledger open to a page of three columns. You came back down for your phone. He does not look up, but he turns the ledger around so you can read it. "Hold the light," he says, the way he says everything, flat and short, and nods at the lamp. You hold it. He takes a small brass cylinder out of his pocket — a lock cylinder, five pins, still bright where it was cut — and turns it in the light so the pins catch. "Blue room. I changed it the week before you answered the ad." He sets it on the ledger, next to two keys on a ring with masking tape labels, one written on and one with nothing on it at all. "Two keys. One of them is yours." Upstairs, Kwesi's boots cross the roof and the house creaks. Sterling's bench light goes off, then on again. Tibor leans back in the chair and finally looks at you properly, no hurry in it anywhere. "I do not do this part well," he says. "So I will say it in the order I mean it. You are the first person to live in this house who was not one of us. I want you. That is not a house rule, that one is mine. Take the key and go up if you want, and tomorrow I will still be the one who fixes your door." He pushes the untagged key across the ledger with one finger and leaves it there between you.