Cyril’s hair, which shone in Aristide’s memory as yellow gold, slick with oil and sticky with wax, had been rudely clipped close to his skull, showing dirty scalp beneath the stubble. His face had settled into pouches and pulled into lines. He was nearly ten years younger than Aristide, but looked a decade older.

Muscle had melted from his bones. Aristide would have put him at a little less than ten stone, except for the weight that heavy drinking had hung around his waist. The same had burst capillaries across his cheeks and nose—once straight and sharp as a knife blade, now buckled at the center and healed badly.

Aristide had once marveled that whatever violence had beaten Cyril body and mind, it had spared his delicate nose. Left it for him to stare down in moments of inbred, monied arrogance. Now even that had been taken from him.

He looked terrible.

If Cyril was as—what? Devastated? Astonished? What was this echoing emptiness of an emotion? If he was feeling as strange as Aristide, he hardly showed it. Instead, he folded the newspaper and set it aside, then picked up a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. He held it cupped beneath his palm, cagey and cramped, as though he expected the wind or rain to put it out. A shame: He had been such an elegant smoker.

Aristide shut the door, too hard. Cyril jumped, then settled back into his chair as if he hadn’t noticed his own tic.

They were in what would have been a bedroom, if this had really been a home. It was clear of furniture except for two caned chairs and a plank table. Aristide took the seat opposite Cyril.

“Hello,” he said, and immediately felt like a fool.

“Stones,” said Cyril. He took a drag on the straight and let it out slowly. “You got old.”

It wasn’t true. Well. Halfway. When Cyril looked at Aristide he could see everything the other man had been. The years hadn’t diminished him: only made him slightly more delicate. He’d always been evasive about his age, and good at avoiding it as a topic of conversation. But in the intervening years it seemed to have caught up with him. There was something brittle in his movements and his manner. Or perhaps that was only the situation in which they found themselves.

And anyway, he couldn’t be that old, silver hair notwithstanding. It looked good on him: the roots gleamed, and faded into dusty streaks of brown and black at the bottom of his shingle, set in waves.

Still, cruelty comforted Cyril. It was be cruel or come apart, and he knew which option would hurt less.

“You don’t exactly look—” said Aristide, then stopped when his voice edged toward breaking.

“Say it,” said Cyril, who wouldn’t be able to bear it if Ari went maudlin on him. “I look awful.”