The snow came down all through Saturday, and by four in the afternoon the whole city had gone soft and white and quiet, like a room in which somebody has just stopped speaking.

Elias stood in the kitchen doorway and watched a man pack a suitcase.

It was a small black case, hard-sided, with a worn leather handle, and it lay open on the sofa in the main room with its lid thrown back like the jaws of some patient animal. Luke moved around it with the unhurried economy that Elias had come to know. He took a shirt from a pile on the arm of the sofa and folded it in thirds, and again in half, and laid it in the case with the collar turned up. He folded another. He placed a pair of dark socks in each shoe, and a pair of shoes in a cloth bag, and the bag in a corner. He did it all without a wasted motion, as a surgeon lays out instruments, and Elias, watching, thought that he had never seen anyone prepare for a journey so carefully who so plainly did not wish to go.

The apartment was very quiet. The radiators ticked. In the east window the light was gray and thick and slowly failing, and the flakes drifted past the glass in a thin slant, one after another, without haste. A kettle simmered on the stove behind Elias, forgotten.

It was not the silence of the cold week. He noticed that at once, standing there with his shoulder against the frame. For five days they had moved around each other in a hush as stiff and bright as ice, every word weighed and every step measured, and it had been a kind of torment. This was different. It was a silence with a pulse in it. Two people in a room, each fully aware of the other, and neither in any hurry to fill the air.

"You are staring," said Luke, without looking up.

"I am observing."

"It is the same thing, in your case."

"It is a very orderly suitcase."

"I have had practice." He laid a tie in the lid, coiled like a small dark snake. "I have been to Albany eleven times. It is always the same. A hotel with an excellent carpet. A conference room with no windows. Four hundred men in gray suits, who agree with one another about everything." His mouth moved. "I give my paper on the second morning. It is called Interagency Cooperation in the Age of Data. I do not think it will change anyone's life."

"It will be very well attended."

"It will be very well slept through."

Elias felt his own mouth move, and let it.

Luke closed the lid. He pressed it down with both palms, and the latches clicked, one, two. Then he straightened, and stood a moment with his hands on the case, looking at it. He did not seem to notice that he had stopped.

"My flight is at ten past eight," he said. "I shall leave at six. The car will come for me at the door."

"I know."

"I have written down the hotel." He took a folded sheet from his shirt pocket, and held it out, across the width of the room. "The name, and the telephone, and the number of the room. I will ring at nine, tonight, and each evening. You need not answer. I only wished you to have it."

Elias crossed the floor and took it.

It was a plain half-sheet, ruled, torn from a pad. The ink was black. The hand was square and careful, and every figure was formed with a faint extra pressure, as though each one had been gone over twice. Beneath the number of the room, at the foot of the page, there was a single line, very small.

If you need me, I will come.

He read it. Then he folded the sheet in half, and in half again, and put it in his breast pocket, where it lay against the thermometer and the small folded card from a white box in a drawer. He did not say anything. There was nothing in him to say.

"Why do you not want to go?" he asked.

It came out quiet.

Luke looked at him.

It was a long, grave, level look. The gray light from the window lay across his face, and showed the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, and the tired softness at the mouth. He seemed to be thinking about it, truly thinking, with the care of a man asked a plain question that deserves a plain answer.

"Because I shall think of this kitchen," he said.

It was a small sentence. It dropped into the room like a coin into a well.

"I shall sit in a conference room, in the dark, with a slide on the wall. And I shall think of a table. And a pot of tea. And someone at the end of it, with a book, who has not turned a page for twenty minutes." His voice was very low. "I shall think of that for three days, and I shall be no use to anybody."

Elias could not breathe.

"There," said Luke. "I have said it." He lifted a hand and let it fall. "It is rather absurd."

"It is not."

"It is a little."

"It is not absurd at all."

They stood looking at one another across a dozen feet of polished floor. The snow went on falling. In the stove-top kettle the water had come to a boil, and began to mutter, and went on muttering to itself in the quiet, a small domestic sound like a thing talking in its sleep.

Luke moved.

He crossed to the door, where his long gray coat was hanging, and took it down, and did not put it on. He held it over his arm. He stood with his back to the room, and Elias saw the great muscles of his shoulders tighten, once, and release. Then he turned.

"There is something that I should like to say before I go," he said.

"Say it."

"It is the first thing that I have ever said to you that was wholly true."

The words fell very softly.

Elias did not move. He stood quite still in the middle of the room, with a folded sheet of paper in his pocket and his gloved hands at his sides, and he felt the whole world draw in around him, narrowing, as the sight of a man narrows before a fall.

"I have told you a great many things," said Luke. "I have been honest with you, I think, in all the ways that I could. I have not lied about the large things. But there is a difference between a thing that is not a lie and a thing that is the whole truth, and I have lived in that difference for six weeks." His voice was very steady. "I shall go on living in it for a little longer. I am not yet able to leave it. I would give anything if I were."

"I know."

"But I wish to tell you this. Whatever you decide about me, Elias. Whatever you come in the end to believe, or to do." He drew a breath. "Decide it with your eyes open."

It hung in the air.

"I have not always let you keep them open," he said. "I know that. I have shut them for you, now and then, with a cup of tea, or a coat, or a word. I thought that it was kindness. I am no longer certain." His mouth shook, and was still. "I should like you to have them open when you choose. Whatever it is. I should like it to be yours."

Elias said nothing.

It was a thing that he had waited for, he thought, all his life, without knowing that he waited. He had stood in rooms where people were gentle with him, and rooms where they were afraid. He had stood in the cold, and in the dark, and in the white glare of a hospital light. But no one had ever stood before him, at the end of a bare plain room, with a coat over their arm, and said: I will not decide this for you.

"You have let me see a great deal," he said.

"I have let you see what I could bear to be seen."

"That is not nothing."

"No." A faint, tired smile. "It is a great deal more than I have ever done."

He stood for a moment longer. Then, quite slowly, he laid the coat across the back of a chair, and came a pace nearer, and stopped. He was perhaps five feet away. In the dim light his face was pale and quite open, and his eyes were very dark.

"May I do something?" he said.

"What?"

"I will show you. If you will let me." He lifted his hand, palm up, and held it out between them, in the air, quite still. "Only that."

Elias looked at it.

It was a large hand, broad across the knuckles, with a long white scar at the base of the thumb and a fine dusting of dark hair on the back. It was not quite steady. It hung there in the gray light like a thing offered at an altar. He saw the lines of the palm, and the ridge of the callus beneath the fingers, and the faint pulse that beat in the wrist.

He did not decide.

He found, afterward, that he could not remember the decision. There had been nothing in it, no weighing, no choice. His own hand rose. It rose slowly from his side, black and gloved and small against the pale ground of the room, and it moved across the gap, and he watched it, with a kind of detached astonishment, as one watches a bird fly out of a cage. It came to rest in the open palm.

The fingers closed.

It was the same as before. The warmth came through the leather, through the layers of cloth, as a tide comes through sand. He felt the whole broad hand cup his own. He felt the thumb settle, once, across the knuckles. And he stood with his hand in a man's hand, in the quiet of the afternoon, with the kettle muttering at his back, and waited.

"May I take it off?" said Luke.

It was barely a sound.

The glove.

He looked down. He looked at his own hand, held in the other's, and at the black band of the cuff at his wrist. He thought of a cold bright morning, and a boy of twenty-one in a laboratory, with a thumb exposed through a torn seam. He thought of nine years in leather. He thought of a hand that had touched the dead for three years, with its breath held, and had not once been touched, in the light, by a living thing.

It was the last of the walls.

It was the one at the center, the one on which all the others rested. He knew that. He knew it as one knows the keystone of an arch. And the man in front of him knew it too. He stood waiting, with Elias's hand in his, very still, with his eyes on Elias's face, and in them there was no hunger at all. There was only a deep, bare, trembling care.

"Yes," said Elias.

Luke let out a long breath.

He took the hand in both of his. He turned it, palm down, and laid it on his own left palm, as one lays a small bird on a table. With his right he took the edge of the cuff. His fingers were trembling. Elias felt it, through the leather, a fine quick shudder, like the tremor in a wire.

He drew the glove away.

It came slowly. He eased it back over the knuckles, one at a time, the way a man peels a bandage from a wound that he is afraid to reopen. It slid off the fingertips. It fell into his hand, a small soft black shell, and he laid it down without a glance on the arm of the sofa. Beneath it lay the second skin. The nitrile. He rolled it back from the wrist, gently, an inch at a time, and let it fall.

The air touched the skin.

It was a very small thing. It was nothing. A draught from the window, a breath of cool room. But Elias felt it as one feels the first rain of a spring that has been very long in coming. He felt it on every nerve of his hand at once, on the backs of the fingers and the soft fork of the thumb and the pale tender hollow of the palm. He felt it go in.

His hand lay open in the gray light.

It was very white. It was a long narrow hand, with the fine bones showing, and the veins like blue threads under the skin, and a thin pale scar at the base of the thumb. It was smaller than he remembered. He had not seen it in the light, among the living, since a day in an anatomy laboratory, long ago. It lay on a stranger's palm like a thing that had been washed up from the sea.

It was shaking.

He watched it. He did not try to still it. It trembled in the larger hand with a small continual flutter, like the wing of a moth, and Luke did not speak. He only held it, and looked at it, with his lips a little parted and his eyes grave and wet.

"It is beautiful," he said.

It was a whisper.

Elias shut his eyes.

"It is the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen."

"It is a hand."

"Yes." There was a smile in the voice. "That is what I mean."

He lowered his head.

He did it slowly, with immense care, bending over the open palm as a man bends over a font. Elias felt the warmth of his breath before anything else. It stirred the fine hairs on his wrist. It touched the skin of the inner arm. His heart gave a great slow knock against the wall of his chest, and stopped, and began again.

Then, quite lightly, a mouth touched the center of his hand.

It was only a breath. It was a pressure no heavier than a petal. It lay in the middle of the palm, at the very heart of it, where the lines cross, and rested there. It was warm. It was dry and soft and faintly trembling. And it did not do anything. It did not take, or press, or ask. It only stayed, with its eyes closed and its brow bent, as a man stays in a church.

Elias stopped breathing.

He had thought, in the old days, in the nights when he lay awake and wondered, that he would see something. He had thought that it would be like the rest. A flash, a dark, a sixty-second drop into someone else's death. He had braced for it, with every muscle, from the moment the glove came away. He stood with his bare hand in the other man's, and every nerve was clenched against the horror.

There was nothing.

There was no dark, no countdown. No rain, no cold, no black waxed jacket. There was only a man's mouth on his hand, and the sound of the kettle in the next room, and the ticking of a radiator, and far off, a plane going over in the snow. There was heat, and the soft faint rhythm of a breath. There was the hum of blood, in his own palm, in his own ears. He was touching a living thing. And it did not hurt. It did not hurt at all.

It was only warm.

A sound came out of him. It was a small broken sound, half a laugh and half a sob, and he put his free hand to his mouth. Tears had risen in his eyes. They stood there, bright and hot, and did not fall.

He felt the mouth lift.

Luke raised his head. His eyes were wet. They were very dark, and very wide, and he was looking at Elias's face with an expression of such unguarded and astonished tenderness that it was almost unbearable. He did not smile. He held the hand between both of his, and pressed it, once, against his chest.

"Thank you," he said.

"For what?"

"For letting me." He swallowed. "I did not think that you would."

Neither of them spoke.

The light had gone almost blue. The snow went on, outside, in a thin white curtain. In the kitchen the kettle had boiled dry, and gave off a faint scorched smell, and neither of them turned.

At last Luke lifted the nitrile glove from the arm of the sofa.

He did it very gently. He took Elias's hand in his left and, with his right, drew on the thin layer, from the fingertips to the wrist, smoothing the folds out one at a time. Then the black leather. He fitted each finger into its place. He eased the cuff over the wrist, and laid it flat. And then, with the pad of his thumb, quite slowly, from the center of the wrist outward, once to the left, and once to the right, he pressed it smooth.

The cuff lay down without a wrinkle.

They looked at each other.

It was not a thing that either of them could have said. There were no words that would have held it. In the dim blue light of the afternoon, with the snow going past the window, two men stood a foot apart with their hands still joined, and looked into one another's faces. And Elias saw, quite plainly, that it was all there. Everything that he knew, and everything that the other knew he knew. The pier and the knife and the voice that said it is almost over. The hospital pillow. The long dark telephone. It all stood between them, in the clear gray air, as plainly as a row of white stones.

I know.

I know that you know.

He did not say it. The man did not say it either. It lay there in the quiet, a plain shared fact, and neither of them touched it.

At five minutes to six, a horn sounded in the street.

Luke started, a little. He drew his hand away, slowly, like a man putting down something that he has been afraid of dropping. He took up his coat and put it on, and fastened it, and took the case from the sofa. He did all of it without a word. He went to the door.

On the threshold he stopped, and did not turn.

"I shall ring at nine," he said.

"I shall answer."

"Thank you."

The door opened on the pale corridor. It closed. A key turned in the lock. Footsteps went away, soft and even, and the elevator chimed far off, and then there was nothing at all.

Elias stood in the middle of the room with his hand held against his chest.

It was still warm. That was the strange thing. He could feel it, through three layers of cloth, a small round glow in the center of the palm, as if a coal had been laid there and left to burn. He stood and looked at it. He closed his fingers on it, gently, as a child closes a hand on a snowflake.

He did not know how long he stood.

The dusk deepened. The lamp in the corner came on, by itself, on its timer, and threw a small yellow circle across the boards. The radiator ticked. And at some point, as the light changed, he found that he had walked, without choosing it, to the far end of the apartment, into the long narrow passage with its linen cupboard and its row of white doors.

He stopped.

At the end of the corridor, in the shadow, the gray steel door stood in the wall. And beside it, in its small black housing, a light was burning.

It was not amber.

It had burned amber for twenty-five nights. It had pulsed, soft and patient and slow, in the dark, like a lantern in a window, since the evening when a hand had reached for it and been refused. He had grown used to it. He had passed it a hundred times, going to and from his room, and had not looked, as one does not look at the face of a clock. It had been part of the house.

It was green.

It was a clear, steady, cool green, the color of a leaf in water. It glowed on the wall like a very small, very calm star. And as he stood there, with his heart suddenly beating hard in his side, the little glass window above the keypad came alight, and a line of pale letters appeared on it, very small and very clear.

READY. 3 ATTEMPTS REMAINING.

Elias did not move.

It had been reset. He knew that at once. A man who left a failed attempt burning for twenty-five nights, as a message, had gone to the panel before he went out, and cleared it. It would have taken a moment. A key, a code, a brief electronic sigh. He would have done it in the dark, in his stocking feet, with the case at his side and a horn waiting in the street.

He would have done it for a reason.

Elias stood in the passage, in the cold green glow, with the warmth of a mouth still lingering on the palm of his hand, and understood, with a calm and terrible clarity, that he had been handed something.

Not the door. The door was only a door.

He had been given the chance.