She stood at the counter, filling the kettle from a stoneware jug. Her hair fell straight down, between her face and my eyes. From behind it, she said, “This body, is it… Did you kill somebody?”

Her voice was smaller than it usually was. When I didn’t answer immediately, she pushed back the hair curtain and darted me a glance. I read her expression: If I had killed someone, well, the world was tough, and she was tough enough to live in it, wasn’t she? I realized suddenly that I didn’t know how old she was. A confusion of feeling smacked me from the inside, understanding, pity, tenderness. My thoughts leaped away from all of them.

“No,” I snapped.

“Oh.” She was trying not to be relieved. She moved out of sight behind me. I heard a cupboard open; then her fingers stroked my shoulder. “What kind of tea do you want?”

I shook my head, as if to dislodge something (which didn’t work). “There’s a dead person in my apartment. I don’t know anything about him, except that there were people after him that I don’t want after me. For all I know, they’re not the only ones after him. I don’t want his debts, I don’t want the blame, and I don’t want any tea. What I want is someone who can make him disappear.”

Dana shrugged. “Dump him on the sidewalk.”

“No. I mean disappear. I’m connected to him already. I don’t want City security stopping by. And the people who were after him saw me with him. If he turns up dead, they’ll come straight to me. You know the ritual for splitting with someone, when you draw a line across the threshold with a knife after they’ve passed? I need the real-life version. Just tell me if you know someone who can help.”

“Easy, sugar. While the tea’s making, I’ll go call somebody.” She gave me a sweet, indulgent look. “You see? It’s not so bad, having friends. Nobody can be by herself all the time. So who is — was — this character?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to decide if that was a lie or not. “It was just — sometimes you bump into people.”

“And take them home,” she added sourly. I wondered if she disapproved of my recklessness, or was only jealous of some imagined intimacy.

“Well, in this case, he got the worst of it.”

“What kind of tea?”

“Will you — Earl Grey,” I said, because I hadn’t seen Earl Grey tea anywhere since… Someone, once, had given me some, but I couldn’t remember who, or when. A long time ago.

She laughed and pulled a stopper out of one of a cluster of tins on the counter. The smell, very strong and fresh, added itself to the incense and unlocked a memory. At the edge of a town in what had been Ohio, in a farmhouse kitchen full of dirty dishes, a fast-talking man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, who told stories as if they’d been corked up in him and my arrival had broken the seal — he had poured tea into a cup for me. The dark liquid had spun and swirled, and wide-eyed, I’d asked, “Why does it smell like that?”