Page 77 of Graceless

He set me on my feet and kept one hand at my back until my knees signed off.

The wind came up off the water, and I flexed my right hand against the ache without thinking about it — working the thumb, the end-of-day rub, the same one I do every night after a bench day.

He watched me do it.

"Give me your hands."

"What?"

"Your hands. Give them to me."

I gave them to him — cramped, cold already in the wind, the right one carrying that deep wire of ache along the thumb that is the tax of my whole trade — and he folded them both inside his, completely.

He went still for half a breath — somewhere else entirely; I felt it arrive and leave through his hands.

Then the warmth came.

Not skin-warmth. Warmth with intention — it poured down into the joints like something molten finding its channels, into the knuckles, along the wire of the ache. And the ache didn't fade. It left, the way a cramp lets go all at once. My whole right hand unclenched for the first time since Monday, and I heard myself make a sound like I'd put it in bathwater.

"What — what is that. What did you just do."

"Something all of us can do." He turned my hands over inside his, and the warmth kept working down into the wrists. "We could quiet a fever. Ease an ache. Put a child back to sleep."

"You didn't tell me this."

"We were reprimanded for it, when we were caught. The job was watching — only watching." His thumbs moved over my palms, once.

I didn't have anything to say to that that wouldn't have broken something, so I didn't say it.

"Look."

Brooklyn, from six stories, at the blue hour. The lights coming on in their thousands, block by block, like the borough remembering itself. The harbor a dark sheet with the ferries stitching it. The Parachute Jump lit up red down at the water, and the el trains sliding their bright windows through the dark, And three blocks over, my roofline — I never would have found it. He turned me by the shoulders and aimed me down a seam between two taller houses, and there, at the bottom of the notch, one small yellow light was burning. My kitchen. Left on.

He didn't have to search for the sightline. He knew exactly where it was.

"Oh," I said.

"Yes."

"This is what you see. This is — all those nights, this is what my window looks like."

"That is what your window looks like." He stood beside me, hands at his sides, and the wind came off the water and didn't touch him. "For a long while it was the only light on this roofline I had any use for."

I stood inside his watching. That's the only way I can say it. All those weeks I had been the thing on the other end of this exact sightline — the woman in the yellow window, watched over and not knowing it. Now I was up here inside the watching, looking down at my life. And my life looked small and warm and worth guarding, and I understood something about him that no answer at any table had gotten to.

"You can see everything from here," I said.

"No." He said it quietly. "You can see everything from here that can be seen. It is not the same thing. I stood on rooftops over this borough while your grandmother was a bride, Caterina. I watched the neighborhood get built. I watched it fill and empty and fill again. I have seen everything from up here." He looked down at the yellow window. "I had never once been in any of it until you fed me eggs."

I put my hand in his. His fingers closed around mine, careful, complete.

We stood there while the blue went to black, and the cold came up off the tar paper, and he shifted, just slightly, so that his body broke the wind before it reached me — not a gesture, not a move, just a fact quietly installed between me and the wind — and something in my chest turned over and lay down different.

And then I said it. Because it had been sitting in me since Sunday, since the plates, since the thought with the cold hands, and the roof felt like the one place high enough to hold it.

"I'm going to die."

He went completely still.