Agata looked at the paper in his big hand.
"She's not going to forgive you," he said. "I want to be straight with you. She might. She's a better person than me. But I wouldn't count on it. And I haven't. I don't know if I'm going to. I want you to know that before you say yes."
"I know," Agata said. "I'm not counting on anything."
"Good." His face, in the dim gray light of the parking deck, was the Stone's face, and was not. "Two o'clock. Enfield Street, by the park. The green house with the ramp. She'll make too much food. Eat it anyway."
Agata took the printout. She folded it one more time, the ninth fold, which it barely had room for, and put it in the bill compartment of her mother's wallet, where it had lived for seven years, and the wallet felt lighter in her hand than it had that morning, and she understood that this was only because the card was gone, and that it was not, in any way that mattered, lighter at all.
"Sunday," she said.
He nodded once and turned and walked back toward the skybridge with his raincoat belt swinging, and at the glass door he stopped and, without turning around, lifted one hand to the height of his shoulder and held it there for a moment, the way a man waves to someone on a platform from a train that is already moving. Then he went through.
She drove home on I-84 in the thickening dark with the radio off. At the light at the bottom of the Corbin Avenue exit her phone buzzed in the cupholder and she looked at it, though she knew she shouldn't, because it was red and there were no cars behind her. It was Kiran. It was a photograph of a clipboard hung on a nail just inside the stair door on twenty-two, and on the clipboard a fire watch log, a grid of lines, and on the first two lines, in square block capitals pressed hard into the paper, someone had written the time, 3:00 p.m., and then 4:00 p.m., and beside each one, Stair C, 22 to 1, all clear, and signed it A. VARNUM. Under the photograph Kiran had written: Didn't have to. He did the first two himself before he left. Said he wanted to be the one.
The light turned green. Agata put the phone face down on the blue folder and drove on toward the high school, where under the lights on the far field she could already see the small dark figures of the girls' varsity running their last drills, and one of them, she knew without being able to see her, would be the left back, waving her arms and shouting at the others to hold the line. She did not know what she would sign. She did not know what she would say on Sunday at a kitchen table on Enfield Street, or what would be said back to her, or what the scan in December would show, or whether a man with twenty-two months to go would still be standing at that desk in the spring. She knew that fifteen doors in a building in Hartford were standing unlocked tonight, and that someone was walking the stairs every hour to make sure, and that when he came to a door with a white sign on it and pressed the lever, it would go all the way down.