Chapter 7: Across the Hall

He slept on my floor for two nights.

He did not ask for a blanket, so I threw him my winter coat.

On the first night I lay on the mattress staring at the slanted ceiling, and I could hear him breathing six feet away.

"Clara," he said in the dark.

"Go to sleep."

"I haven't slept on a floor since I was nine."

"You slept in the tree house."

"That had a cushion."

I put my hand over my mouth so he would not hear me laugh.

He heard.

"There it is," he said softly.

On the third morning my landlady, a tiny woman of seventy, knocked on my door with a mop.

"Apartment 3B is empty," she announced. "Your young man can have it if he paints the hall."

"He's not my young man."

"He is carrying your lamp, dear."

He was.

He was standing behind me in his wrinkled suit shirt, holding my lamp in both arms.

By evening Miles had painted two coats of cream on a stairwell wall, in borrowed overalls.

He had white spatters on his forearms and a streak across his forehead.

I stood on the stairs and watched him work.

He had never held a roller in his life, and he was doing it with the same fierce attention he gave a spreadsheet.

"You've got it on your ear," I said.

"I know."

"You've got it in your eyebrow. The scarred one."

"I'm aware."

He stepped back to look at the wall, and then at me, and a slow, helpless grin spread over his face.

I had not seen that grin since he was sixteen.

It hit me so hard I had to put a hand on the rail.

That was how I missed the stair.

My foot went sideways on the wet drop cloth, and my ankle rolled under me with a crack that made us both go white.

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