"Occupational hazard."
"You read field guides to desert wildlife."
"I like knowing what's out there."
Amani took the plate. He looked at the burger the way he'd looked at Nero's card at the bar, like an object he wasn't sure he'd earned. Then he ate. Not much. Half the burger, a few bites of the other half. But he ate, and the act of eating seemed to settle something in him, the way it does when the body remembers that it has needs beyond survival and starts attending to them again.
"Your house is quiet," Amani said.
"Yeah."
"Not desert quiet. Just—" He set the plate down on the coffee table. "Regular quiet."
Nero understood what he meant. There was a difference between the silence of an empty desert and the silence of a neighborhood at four in the morning. One was absence. The other was presence, sleeping families behind lit porches, a dog barking three streets over, the distant hiss of a sprinkler on a timer. The sound of a world going on around you. The sound of not being alone.
"You can stay," Nero said. "Couch is yours if you want it. I'll be in the kitchen."
Amani didn't answer. He pulled the hoodie tighter around himself and turned sideways on the couch and put his head on the armrest and closed his eyes. After eating his own burger, Nero went back to the kitchen and sat with his case files and listened to the kid's breathing slow by degrees, still ragged, still catching, but settling, settling, the way a stone settles in water,finding its way down through the resistance to the place where it can finally stop moving.
Amani slept for forty minutes. It was the first real sleep he'd gotten since the ranch and Nero knew that because of the way he woke up, not the sharp, gasping jolt of someone startled out of a nightmare, but the slow, disoriented surfacing of someone who'd actually gone under. He sat up and looked around the room and for a second his face was open and confused and young, and then the armor came back, piece by piece, and he was Amani again.
"I should go," he said.
"Okay."
"This doesn't mean anything."
"I know."
"I'm not going to make a habit of this."
"Okay."
Amani stood. He pulled the sleeves of the hoodie over his hands and walked to the door and opened it and the predawn air came in, warm and dry and carrying the faint chemical sweetness of the Strip. He stood in the doorway for a beat longer than leaving required.
"The burgers were acceptable," he said.
"High praise."
"Don't let it go to your head." He stepped off the porch. "Goodnight, Detective."
"It's morning."
"Goodnight, Detective."
Nero watched him walk down the sidewalk until he turned the corner, and then he closed the door and washed the plates and sat back down with his case files and did not think about the way Amani's breathing had sounded when it finally evened out, or the way his hand had been open on the cushion insteadof fisted, or the forty minutes of peace that a kid in a gray hoodie had found on a terrible couch in a ferret's living room.
He didn't want to think about any of that. He was a professional.
He thought about it constantly.
***
The four AM visits became a pattern.
Not every night. Not even most nights. But often enough that Nero started keeping burger ingredients stocked, and then eggs, and then the stuff for quiche because it turned out that quiche was the perfect four AM food: warm, filling, and impossible to eat aggressively. Amani would show up on the porch in the hoodie with his arms wrapped around himself. Nero would let him in. Nero would cook. Amani would eat, and sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes Amani fell asleep on the couch. Sometimes he just sat there in the quiet until the sun came up. Then he went home.
Nero learned the rhythms.
