"I apologize," he said. "I thought you were somebody else."
"Who did you think I was?"
He found that he did not want to say. He found that the true answer, said out loud in this room, was going to sound like what it was. "There's been a letter," he said. "To the house. Threatening. I thought—" He stopped. "It doesn't matter what I thought."
"It might," she said. "To me." But she said it without heat, almost gently, the way you might correct a child's grammar. Then she patted the chair beside her, once, the chrome arm between them, as if she were inviting him to sit down at her kitchen table. "You've been on your feet since four o'clock, I'd guess. Sean says you get up at four on the days that matter."
He did not sit. He did not know what to do with his hands. He had the strangest feeling, standing there in front of her, of having walked into the wrong apartment on a call, of standing in the middle of some stranger's living room with his flashlight out and the family on the couch staring at him, and the address on the computer had been wrong, and nobody here had done anything at all.
"Ms. R.," he said.
She smiled then, very slightly, a smile that didn't go all the way. "That's what they call me inside."
"He talks about you. He's talked about you for years."
"He talks about you too," she said.
He waited for her to say how. She did not say.