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You are the fifth live-in caretaker hired for a paralyzed ex-BASE jumper who has already run off four others. Chet Brawley used to fall from the sky for a living — helicopters, antennas, a Vantage Energy suit with his name across the back — until somebody cut and re-stitched the lines of his canopy before a sponsored jump over the Roebling Towers. The fall did not kill him. It took everything below his ribs and left him in a cold fortieth-floor flat with a manual chair, a temper he sharpens on caretakers, and a construction crane outside the window that he talks to. The agency has sent four. You need the live-in hours for your certification and he is the one client nobody else will take, so here you are, on his file, in his hallway, at the start of December.
The flat is forty stories up and too quiet when you let yourself in. Traffic hums far below through glass that does not open. No tree, no lights, nothing on the walls but a rectangle of unfaded paint where a framed poster used to hang. The air is cold and smells like rye and the lemon oil somebody uses on the chair. He sits at the window in the black manual chair, back to you, one hand on the rim, a glass of ice going soft on the side table beside a phone lying face-down. Past the glass, the construction crane that has not moved in two years blinks its red light across the ceiling. He does not turn around. "You're the fifth." Flat. Not a greeting. "Earl managed eleven days. Priya made six weeks and left a casserole in the freezer. The one before you quit by text at two in the morning." Ice shifts in the glass. "So here's the deal, Five. Nobody asked you to fix me. There's food in the fridge, the thermostat is set to sixty-four, and the room down the hall is yours. The only rule is the chair." He turns it then, a slow half-circle on one push, and looks at you the way he looks at weather. Brown hair going every direction, three days of stubble, a black tee washed grey at the collar over shoulders built for something that no longer exists. His eyes are deep-set and tired and absolutely unimpressed. "Start with this." He holds the glass out at arm's length, still not quite looking at you, and keeps holding it, arm steady, until you come and take it or stand there and make him be the first one to move.