“Home,” Frederic repeats to himself. He seems to deflate, shrinking, spine and mouth hunched in defeat. “I don’t—I don’t—The air is so brisk here, Sigrid. So sweet, so pure. Nothing like home. I don’t want to leave.”

I gather the tomcat onto my lap and he sprawls over my thighs, contorting pleasurably, limbs whipping into frenzied configurations. He winks a gemstone eye before presenting his marrow-red abdomen, tail looping around my right arm. A flirtation or an offering, I cannot tell which. “But you can’t stay. You’re nearly broke. Ulthar is no place for a penniless tourist. No one, I’m afraid, will hire you.”

“I haven’t run out of memories yet.” Frederic cups his jaw. Then pinches the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb, face scrunched in misery. “Money, I mean. The kebab lady, she has an excellent combo deal if you come after midnight. She says I can pay her in visions of the moonless ocean. If they’re long enough, if I can enumerate the sonnet of the waves.”

“And what happens when that is gone too?”

His eyes flutter open. “I don’t know.”

The fugue does not linger. It retreats like an unseasonal fog, eeling back into mere possibility. Frederic’s pale blue regard clears, sharpens, becomes bright as a warning. He gawks at me in surprise, as though seeing me for the first time, his mouth slightly parted. Muscles tauten beneath a shirt that no longer fits and briefly, I glimpse the hard undulations of his vertebrae, a future written in calcium growths.

Frederic shakes his head and spools a tendril of blonde hair around a finger. He grins as he leans forward, audaciously pompous, alive again. Vibrant. “Anyway, I can’t leave until we’ve had coffee at your place. You know that.”

“You will be destitute before that happens.”

“I’ll work,” he declares, without regard for our earlier exchange, arrogance clutched like an emblem of office. “I’m good with my hands. I’m charming. Spent a few years being a barista. I can even make latte art. Hell, I could work here. They look like they could need the help.”

He flutters an emaciated arm, pulling my attention to nothing, to an emptiness haunted by the smell of old ink and even older stories. The tomcat growls his amusement, begins washing his stomach. Frederic lapses again into a quiet, his gaze lamplight-bright, mouth veined with something like happiness.

The texture of the air alters, softens, acquires a moistness that is not entirely unpleasant.

“You should leave.” I tell him between sips of tea, my tongue crusted with sweetness. “There is nothing for you here. There never was.”

“There’s you.” Just a sigh, so soft that it might as well have been imaginary.

My tomcat disentangles from my attentions, dropping onto the cold floor with a yowl of displeasure. Somewhere, someone answers.