He slept for four hours on the sofa, with a blanket over him that he did not remember taking, and woke at noon to the sound of a man lying about the flu.

It came through the wall from the far end of the apartment, low and hoarse and entirely convincing. He lay with his eyes shut and listened. "Yes, sir," said the voice. "I am afraid so. I came back from Albany last night, on the last flight, with a fever, and I have been in bed since. I am most sorry about the paper. Please give the association my regrets." A pause. A small dry cough, very well timed. "No, sir, I would not dream of infecting the staff. Thank you. I will let you know."

The telephone was set down. A bed creaked. And then, for a long while, there was nothing, and Elias lay on the gray sofa in the pale snow-light and looked at the ceiling and thought that he had never before heard anyone lie so beautifully for so good a reason.

It was Monday. The twenty-third. The snow had begun again in the night, a fine dry powder blowing sideways past the glass, and the whole city lay under it in a long white hush. Nobody had telephoned the apartment. Nobody had come. He lay in a house in which, ten hours earlier, a man had put a pistol into his hand and pressed the muzzle to his own heart, and nothing in the room had changed. The radiator ticked. A clock on the shelf said ten past twelve. A cup of tea stood on the floor beside the sofa, cold, on a saucer, with a spoon laid beside it.

He did not know what to do with the day.

He got up, and washed his face, and put on a clean shirt. He drank the cold tea standing at the window. He stood a long time with the cup in his hand, looking down at the white river, and the black bridges, and the small dark shapes of cars crawling across them in the snow. Then he went into the kitchen, and made more, and sat down at the oak table, and did not drink it.

By four it was dusk.

It came early, in November, a blue-gray dimness rising out of the snow, and the lamps of the city came on one by one along the river like beads on a string. He had not turned on the light in the kitchen. He sat in the gloom with his bare hands wrapped around the warm china. He had taken off his gloves at noon, to wash, and had not put them on. They lay on the table in front of him, side by side, black and still. He looked at them as one looks at a pair of shoes belonging to someone who has died.

He thought of a number of things.

He thought of Quinn, with her three rolls in a plastic box. He thought of a woman on a stairwell, and a woman at a door, and the soft cry of a man at the foot of a tower. He thought of a gray box on a shelf. He thought of a hand, laid on the blotter an inch from his own, palm down, and not moving. It had been so very still. It had lain there for an hour in the lamplight, like a dog beside a sleeper, and had never once asked for anything.

He had been shown the whole of it. That was the thing. He had been taken down into the cellar of a man's life and shown the foundations, every stone, and every stone was true. There was not a seam. He had looked for one all night. And he had come up out of it into the gray morning with nothing in his hands but the plain fact, and the plain fact was this.

A man had done a terrible thing, for a reason, and the reason was good.

It did not make the thing less terrible. He understood that. He had stood over five of the dead. He had felt the last of their breath. A man could be entirely right about what had been done to him, and entirely wrong in what he did about it, and the two were not weighed against each other on a scale. They sat side by side, like two stones in a pocket. He could hold them both. He had held them both for weeks.

He had come, tonight, to the end of holding.

He did not hear the step.

It was a thing he would remember, afterward, with a faint dry wonder. He had learned that tread so well. He could have told it in a crowd, in the dark, from three rooms away. But he sat at the table with his eyes on the gloves, and the footsteps came down the passage, soft and unhurried, and stopped at the door of the kitchen, and he knew only that the air had altered. It had grown warmer. It smelled of soap, and of cedar, and of a man who has slept in his clothes.

"I will not ask," said Luke.

He stood in the doorway.

He had put on a clean shirt, a plain white one, open at the neck, and a pair of gray trousers. His feet were bare. His hair was damp and standing up a little at the back, as a boy's does who has put his head under a tap. He looked rested, in a bruised and thin-skinned way, like a man who has been very ill and has not yet found that he is well. One hand lay against the frame. He did not come in.

"I wish to say that at the start," he said. "I have been lying in that room for six hours, and I have told myself that I will not ask you anything at all. Not what you have thought. Not what you will do. You have had your night. You have read the file. And whatever you have decided is yours, and I will be quiet."

"I have decided," said Elias.

Luke stopped breathing.

He did not move. He stood in the gray doorway with his hand on the wood and his lips a little parted, and Elias, looking up, saw all the color go out of his face. It went from the forehead downward, like a tide going out, and left it white and sharp and quite young. The eyes were enormous. They were fixed on Elias's face with an expression that he had seen once before, on a pier, in the rain, under a lamp. The expression of a man who has done what he could, and is waiting to be told what will happen to him.

"Sit down," said Elias.

Luke sat.

He did it in the chair at the far end of the table, the one that he always took, with his back to the window. He laid his hands on the wood. They were not steady. He pressed them flat.

Elias looked at his own.

They lay on the table, bare, on either side of his cup. White, narrow, a little cold. He had not looked at them in the dusk for a very long time. He turned them over, palms up, and looked at the faint lines, and he spoke, in the level voice that he used for facts.

"I am going to say some things," he said. "I should like you to hear all of them before you answer."

"Yes."

"I do not forgive you."

It lay in the room like a stone.

"I want that understood. It is not a thing that I am able to do. I do not think that it is a thing that is in my power." He drew a slow breath. "You killed five men. I have held their last minutes in my hands. You did it with a patience and a skill that I have not words for. You deceived a great many people, and you deceived me. You put a woman who loves you in a position where she may one day be destroyed. I do not forgive any of it. I do not suppose that I ever will."

"No," said Luke. His voice was a thread. "I would not ask it."

"I know that you would not. That is the difficulty." A short breath that was not quite a laugh. "I have tried for six weeks to hate you. I have been very diligent. I have made a list."

"I have seen it."

Elias looked up.

"It was in your coat," said Luke. His eyes were fixed on the table. "On the night that I carried you from the laboratory. It fell from the pocket. A small black book, open at a page. I did not read it. I read the heading." A pause. "It was a good list."

"You did not mention it."

"It was yours."

Elias held the dark eyes for a moment. Then he looked away. He found that his throat was very tight, and that something was moving in his chest like a small trapped bird.

"I have conditions," he said.

"Name them."

"I will tell you what they are, and you will not agree at once. You will think about each one. They are not small."

"I am listening."

"The first." He lifted a finger. "Nothing that you do, from this day, will be done without my reading it first. Not a plan, not a name, not a street. I will see the whole of it, as I saw the file. I will take it apart. And if I cannot find the flaw in it, then and only then will you act."

"Yes."

"The second. No one dies on suspicion. Not Aldridge. Not the least of them. I will not have a man put to death because we are certain. We will have it so that if the whole of it were laid before a jury, in a clean court, with an honest judge, there would be no other verdict. If we have not that, we do not move." His voice was steady. "I know what the courts are. I know what they have been. But I will not be the thing that I am hunting. I will not let you, either."

"Yes."

"The third." He lowered the hand. "If I say stop, you stop. It does not matter where we are, or what we are doing. It does not matter that the thing is half done. If I tell you that it is enough, then it is enough."

Luke was silent.

It was a different silence. It was longer, and heavier, and Elias saw him think. He sat with his hands pressed on the table, and the last gray light on his face, and the great muscles of his throat moved once. He did not look away.

"I do not know that I can," he said.

It was a very quiet voice.

"I want to say yes. I would say it, if I could. But I have been doing this for twelve years, and I do not know what is on the other side of it. I do not know what I would be, if I stopped." His mouth shook. "I will try. I give you my word that I will try, with all that is in me. But I will not lie to you. I will not tell you that I am certain."

"That is the only answer that I could have accepted."

Luke looked up.

"If you had said yes, at once, I should not have believed you." Elias's voice cracked, very slightly, and steadied. "I think that you are the most honest man that I have ever known. It is a terrible thing to say. I do not know what to do with it."

"Elias."

"There is a fourth."

"Yes."

"You tell me the rest." He leaned forward, a little. "All of it. The house. The night. What you saw, and what you did, and what you have not said. I will not ask for it now. I do not think that either of us could bear it. But it is owed. And you will pay it when you are able."

"I will."

"Say it."

"I will tell you everything," said Luke. "I swear it. When I can."

Elias sat back.

He did not know that he had been holding himself so rigid. It came out of him in a long slow sigh, and the muscles of his back and shoulders let go, one after another, like the knots in a rope. He looked at the man across the table. He looked at the white shirt, and the rumpled dark hair, and the pale scar through the left brow. He looked at the hands, spread flat on the wood, and at the faint tremor that ran through them like wind through reeds.

He stood.

The chair scraped on the tile. Luke started, a little, and half rose, and Elias lifted a hand, and he sank back. He came round the end of the table. He did it slowly, with each step set down quite deliberately, as one crosses a frozen river. He stopped a pace from the other man's chair. It was less than the length of an arm. He could feel the warmth of the body against the cool of the room, like the radiance of a lamp.

"I know who you are," he said.

Luke sat quite still, with his face tipped up.

"I know what you have done. I have seen it, in the last light of a man's eyes, from the inside. I have seen it done to a boy in a plain room with a paper cup. I know the knife, and the voice, and the lie." His own voice shook. "I know all of it. There is nothing that you have kept from me, tonight, that I have not seen for myself."

"Yes."

"And I choose this. With my eyes open."

It was said very softly. It was the very sentence that had been said to him, on a snowy afternoon, with a coat over an arm. He saw that it was recognized. A tremor went through the man in the chair, from the crown of his head to his hands, as a tremor goes through a bell.

"Elias," he whispered.

"Do not speak."

He lifted his right hand.

He held it in the air between them, white and bare, a little way in front of his chest. It was shaking. He looked at it, with a kind of detached astonishment. It was the hand that had held the dead. It was the hand that had held a weapon, last night, for a long cold moment, in a lamp. It was the hand that, on Saturday, in the snow-light, had lain palm up in another's, and been kissed.

He had thought that he would put on his gloves.

He had thought, in the long afternoon, that there might be a way to do it that was not so bare. That he might take what he was about to take through three layers of black. It would have been easier. It would have been safe. And he stood in the gloaming, with the whole of the apartment silent around him, and the other man's face upturned, and saw that it would not be the same.

He would not do it by half.

"Watch," he said.

He did not need to. He had no gloves to remove. They lay on the table behind him, side by side, where he had left them at noon. But he lifted his bare right hand in front of Luke's eyes, and turned it, once, slowly, back and front. He let it be looked at. He did it as a man holds up an empty palm to show that there is nothing in it. A white hand, with a faint scar at the base of the thumb. A small and living thing.

"There is nothing between us," said Elias.

Luke's eyes filled.

"No."

"There is no glove. There is no wall. There is no, there is nothing that I have not told you, or you me." He drew breath. "I am going to put my hand on your face. I do not know what will happen. I think that nothing will."

"Nothing will," said Luke. His voice was almost inaudible. "I know it. I know it will not."

"How?"

"Because you are alive. And so am I."

Elias laid his hand against the man's cheek.

It was warm. It was the first thing, and for a moment the only one. It was a great, soft, living warmth, like the warmth of bread, or of a stone that has lain all day in the sun. The skin was slightly rough beneath his palm, with the faint scrape of a day's growth. It was damp. A tear had run down it, and gathered along the edge of the jaw, and he felt it, cool and light, against the heel of his thumb.

There was no dark.

There was nothing. There was no countdown, no rain, no cold. There was only a face, in his hand, and the pulse that beat in the temple under his fingertips, quick and light as a bird's. There was breath, soft and uneven, against his wrist. There was a man.

He heard a small sound.

It came out of the man in the chair, low and broken, a sound like a sob drawn through the teeth. His eyes had closed. His lashes were wet. He turned his head, very slightly, into the palm, and laid his cheek against it, and leaned his whole weight there, as a man leans on a wall who has been walking for a very long time in the dark.

"Elias," he said.

It was a whisper. It was a breath. It was said against the skin of a hand.

"Elias. Elias."

He bent.

He did not decide. It was not a decision. It was the movement of a man who has been a very long time on one side of a river, and has looked at the other, and finds that his feet are already in the water. He felt his own face come down, through a great slow hush, and the warmth of the man's breath on his lips, and the air between them narrowing, to a hand's breadth, and a finger's, and then to nothing at all.

He kissed him.

It was a very small kiss. It was no more than a touch, dry and light and trembling, a brushing of mouth against mouth. He felt the other man's lips, soft and cracked and warm, a little parted. He tasted salt. It was the briefest thing, and the stillest. It lasted perhaps two seconds, and in those two seconds nothing moved in the whole of the room, except his own heart, which struck once against his ribs like a fist on a door.

He drew back an inch.

Luke had not moved.

He sat quite rigid in the chair, with his face tipped up and his eyes still shut, and his mouth open a little, as if he had been struck. He did not breathe. His hands were gripping the edge of the table so hard that the knuckles had gone white. His whole body was taut as a drawn bow. He looked, thought Elias, like a man who has been given something so large that he cannot lift it, and is afraid that if he moves, it will go.

"Luke?"

The eyes opened.

They were dark, and wild, and brimming. They looked up at Elias with an expression of such naked, helpless wonder that it was almost frightening. There was no triumph in them, and no hunger. There was only astonishment. The look of a man who has stood in the rain for twelve years, outside a lit window, and has been asked in.

Then a hand came up.

It rose slowly from the table, and closed over Elias's, the one that still lay against the cheek. It held it there. The other lifted, and came to rest, with enormous care, at the back of his neck, in the short soft hair below the collar. It did not pull. It did not press. It lay there, light as a leaf.

And Luke kissed him back.

It was not like the first. It was slow, and warm, and infinitely careful, as a man steps onto ice that he is afraid will not hold. He felt the mouth move against his own, very gently, with a small tremor in it that did not cease. He felt it open, and close, and open again, as if it were learning a word. There was salt in it. There was the faint dry taste of tea. There was a long shuddering breath that went through them both, from one to the other, like a current through a wire.

He did not know how long it lasted.

It might have been a minute. It might have been the whole of the evening. It seemed to him, in the gloaming, with the snow ticking at the glass and a hand at the back of his head, that time had stopped altogether, and the kitchen hung in the dusk like a room at the bottom of the sea. He thought of nothing. He did not weigh, or judge, or count. For the first time in twelve years, there was nothing in him but warmth.

When they drew apart, it was by the width of a breath.

Their foreheads touched. Their eyes were closed. He felt the other man's lashes brush his cheek, wet, and the warm uneven gust of breath against his lips, and the hand at his neck, which was trembling so that it shook the hair on his nape. Neither spoke. They stood in the dusk with their heads bowed together, like two people at the edge of a grave, or a font.

"Are you sure?" said Luke.

It was only a murmur. It was hardly a sound.

"No."

"Elias..."

"No. I am not." He did not open his eyes. "I do not think that I have ever been less sure of anything in my life. I think that it may be the worst thing that I have ever done. I think that it may be a great deal worse than what you did." He swallowed. "I do not know what comes after. I do not know if I shall be able to stand it."

"Then why..."

"Because I choose."

The hand at his neck went still.

"It is not that I am sure. I am nothing like sure. It is that I choose." His voice was very low, and quite steady. "I think that that is the difference. I have been sure of a great many things. I was sure that I would never be touched. I was sure that I could be quite alone. I have been wrong about all of them." He drew breath. "I would rather be wrong about this, with my eyes open, than right about the rest."

There was a long silence.

A sound came from the man before him, soft and raw and very close to laughter. His arm slid down from the back of Elias's neck, and went about his shoulders, and drew him in. It did not crush. It held him as a man holds a sleeping child, against his chest, with the great warm weight of it all about him. A cheek came to rest against his hair.

"Thank you," said Luke.

It was hardly audible.

"Do not thank me."

"I shall thank you for the rest of my life."

"That is a very long time."

"It is the only thing that I have."

Elias did not answer. He stood with his face against the man's collar, in the circle of a single arm, and his own hand, bare and white, still lay along the line of the jaw. He had not taken it away. He did not wish to. He felt the pulse beneath his fingertips, steady and strong and slow, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever touched.

Outside, the snow was falling.

It came down in the lamplight, past the thirty-first-floor window, large and soft and slow, and the whole dark city lay under it like a held breath. The radiator ticked. A clock said, in a small dry voice, that it was a quarter to six. In the gloaming of a bare kitchen, two men stood together at the end of a table, with a pair of black gloves lying side by side behind them, and neither of them moved.

They stood so for a long time.