The kettle had clicked off a long time ago, and Felix had let it. He sat at the kitchen table in the grey hour before sunrise, in a building that had been beige once and was beige still, on a street whose name he had practiced saying without inflection. A cup of tea steamed at his elbow. He had poured it the way a person who lived here would pour it. He had not touched it. Across the room, on the windowsill, Whiskers had stopped pacing. This was either good or bad. Felix considered it without moving his head. The cat had been circling for eleven minutes. She had paused twice, both times near the door, which was a habit he had been trying to discourage in himself as much as in her. Now she sat at the glass, tail down, watching something in the street four floors below.

He did not look at what she was watching. Not yet. Looking was a thing you could be seen doing. Instead, he picked up the pen beside the cup and signed the bottom of a utility statement that had arrived three days ago in the name on his lease. The signature was unremarkable. He had practiced that, too. He had practiced, over three years, a great many small things: how to hold a grocery bag, how to nod at a doorman, how to be a man whose face slid off the memory of anyone who passed him. He had been good at large things once. The small ones were harder. Whiskers's ears moved without the rest of her.

Felix folded the statement in thirds and carried it to the desk by the window, taking the long way, past the radiator, so that his path through the lit kitchen made geometric sense to anyone looking up from the street. He opened the second drawer. He slid the folded paper into the green folder where folded papers went. His hand stopped. At the back of the drawer, behind the folders, sat a small glass jar. It had once held something domestic, jam maybe, and now held four baby teeth, white as rice, resting against each other at the bottom. He had not opened the jar in seven years. He had not thrown it away in seven years. These two facts had achieved, over time, the quality of a single fact.

He rested his palm on the lid. The glass was cool. He did not pick it up. He did not look at it. He closed the drawer. At the window, Whiskers had not moved. Felix crossed back to the table and, because it would have been strange not to, lifted the tea and drank from it. It was the temperature of the room. He set it down. He allowed himself, then, one glance at the window, angled past Whiskers, out and up.

The tower stood where it had stood every morning. Twenty blocks east, taller than the buildings around it had any reason to permit, its upper floors washed in the soft institutional white they used at night to remind the city it was being looked after. From here it was the size of his thumbnail. He had chosen this apartment, in part, because the tower was visible from it. A person should know where the weather is coming from. Something in his jaw moved. He noticed it move. He smoothed it. "Hm," he said, and the sound was almost nothing, and Whiskers's ear flicked toward him anyway, and he understood that he had made a mistake, small but real, the kind of mistake that, accumulated, became a file. He lowered his eyes to the table.

Downstairs, on the opposite sidewalk, in the recessed doorway of a dry cleaner that did not open for another two hours, a man stood with a paper cup and the patience of someone being paid to have it. Felix had clocked him at 4:51. It was now 5:34. The man had not raised the cup to his mouth in nineteen minutes. There was a way of holding coffee you weren't drinking that gave you away, and this man had not yet learned it. He would. They sent the new ones first. The new ones were a courtesy, almost. A note slipped under the door: we are still here, we are still watching, please continue to be no one. He had been no one for three years and one month. He intended to be no one for as long as it took. Whiskers turned her head.

She dropped from the sill in a single soundless motion, crossed the floor without hurry, and stepped up into his lap. She did not knead. She did not circle. She settled, facing the window, and went still in the particular way she had, which was not the stillness of a sleeping animal but the stillness of something listening on a frequency he could not hear. He rested two fingers on her back. Her ribs moved, slow, even. Outside, the sky had not yet committed to being blue. The tower's white lights held. The man in the doorway lifted his cup at last, and lowered it without drinking, and Felix, who had trained himself out of most things, did not look away fast enough to pretend he had not been looking.

The tea on the table had gone cold. He left it there. He sat with the cat in his lap and the drawer closed behind him and the window in front of him, and he waited, the way he had taught himself to wait, for whatever was about to begin to declare itself. Whiskers, in his lap, had already heard it.

The café was the kind that survives by accident. Wedged between a dry cleaner and a shuttered tailor, three tables, mismatched chairs, a window so fogged with rain that the street outside looked like a memory of a street. Felix had chosen it years ago for exactly this reason. The kind of place where a man could sit for an hour without being seen, and where, if he was seen, the seeing would not survive the walk to the curb. Chen came in at six minutes past the hour. His coat was darker at the shoulders than at the hem. He did not shake the rain off. He sat.

Between them on the table were four sugar packets, fanned by some previous customer's restless hand. Neither of them touched the fan. Neither of them moved it. Felix noted the fan the way he noted everything now, as if the sugar packets might later be asked to testify. "You look the same," Chen said. "I am not." Chen almost smiled. The almost did not finish. Felix watched him order tea he would not drink. Chen had aged the way men age inside the building. Not in the face, where the lighting was kind, but in the hands. Chen's hands were older than the rest of him by a decade. Felix remembered when those hands had been steady enough to thread a wire through a casing the width of a matchstick. They were not steady now. "How is the shop," Felix said. Flat. Not a question. "The shop is the shop."

"The shop is the shop," Felix repeated, to himself, the way he repeated things now to test them for weight. Chen looked at the window. The window gave him nothing. He looked at the door. The door gave him nothing. He looked, finally, at the sugar packets, which was the safest of the available surfaces. "There is a review," he said. "Old files. Older than the usual cycle." "How old." "Older." Felix waited. Chen had always been a man who needed the silence to finish his sentences for him. "The early years," Chen said. "The ones from before. The ones from when it was small." "Names." "Names are being pulled. I do not know whose. I know they are being pulled."

Felix lifted the cup. It was a small cup, badly glazed, and the coffee in it was already cooling toward the temperature he had grown used to. He drank. He set the cup down. He did not ask the next question, because the next question would tell Chen what he wanted to know, and Chen was already a man who knew too much for his own posture. Chen leaned forward. Not far. Just enough that the lamp above the table found the wet collar of his shirt. "Pell," he said. Felix's hand was halfway back to the cup. It stopped. It did not continue.

There is a particular stillness a person performs when they have decided, in the half-second available to them, that any motion will be the wrong motion. Felix performed it. The hand stayed where it was, palm down, fingers slightly curled, six inches from the rim of the cup. He let three seconds pass. Then four. Then he withdrew the hand to his lap, the way a man withdraws from a hot stove without admitting the stove was hot. "Pell," Felix said. "He is reviewing. He is asking the early questions. He is asking them in the order a person asks them when they already know some of the answers." "How would you know what order." Chen did not answer this. Chen's eyes went to the door again. The bell above the door had not rung. The door had not opened. Chen looked at it anyway.

"I came because you would have come," Chen said. "If it had been me." Which was not an answer to the question Felix had asked, and which was, Felix thought, possibly the most honest thing Chen had said in twenty years. Or possibly the most rehearsed. The two had begun, in his old line of work, to resemble each other. "I am not named," Felix said. Testing it. "I do not know if you are named." "You do not know." "I do not know," Chen said. "I know the stack is deep. I know your years are in the stack. I know he is not a man who reads at random."

Felix considered the sugar packets. He considered the rain on the window. He considered the small distance between what Chen had said and what Chen had been sent to say, and could not, with the tools available to him at this table, measure it. "Thank you," he said. Chen flinched at the thanks. Then he stood. He had not removed his coat. He had not drunk the tea. He left a coin on the table that was too much for the tea and too little to be a message, and he walked to the door, and the bell finally rang, once, soft, as he pulled it open.

On the threshold he looked back. Just once. Quickly. The look was not long enough to read, and it was not short enough to ignore, and Felix would spend the walk home and the hours after the walk home trying to decide which of those two facts mattered more. Then Chen was through the door, and into the rain, and into the small wet crowd moving toward the transit entrance at the corner, and the door swung shut behind him with the soft chime of a bell that had been hung there, Felix suddenly remembered, by the previous owner, who had been dead now for some years. Felix stood on the pavement a long minute. He did not open an umbrella. He watched the place where Chen had been, and then the place past that, until the place past that was only people, and then only rain.

At home, the window above the sink framed a small shape that did not move when he came through the door. Whiskers was where he had left her, on the sill, ears forward, the muscles along her shoulders drawn into the particular tightness she reserved for sounds he could not hear. She did not turn her head when he set down his keys. She did not turn her head when he hung up his coat. She kept her attention on the street, where there was, as far as Felix could see, nothing to attend to. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her watch. "Pell," he said, quietly, to no one, to test the name in the room. Whiskers' tail moved. Once. The smallest possible motion a tail can make and still be said to have moved. Felix went to the drawer.