Twice he’s seen her in the spa when neither of them are meant to be there. He hates the long lines for the showers at the boardinghouse, so sometimes he sneaks in after work to enjoy the pressure, the hot stream. She emerged from the women’s room in a blue dress, her mouth slicked with pink. It’s one of the reasons he’s so angry about her pushing him away when he wanted to show her his drawing. He thought they had an understanding—the first time she caught him, or they caught each other, she started, but then gave him a single slow nod, as if to wish him good night. But it doesn’t matter now. He’ll make everything burn, everyone pay.

As he slips in the back way, through the gym, and then along the dim, narrow halls, he still grapples with the strangeness of the place, its whiteness. The hallway of empty rooms. The clean smells that remind him of the medicine his grandmother rubbed on his chest when he was very small, but without comfort.

He knows it is late, that everyone is gone for the night, so he takes off his shoes, pads through the hallway to the big double door. The room has two beds in it, blankets, square vases filled with small rocks. He cracks open the cabinets, squeezes tubes of cream, unscrews the caps on all the small jars. Then he finds the candle, and it feels like a gift. Recently he can’t stop thinking of his grandmother—those candles with the saints’ faces she would light on the windowsill while she prayed. He had spent that evening of the fire trying to paint the glow of the saints, but the combination of dimness and light had been too difficult. He had meant to move the bottle of turpentine before he went to sleep, but frustrated by his failures to get the colors right, he’d stormed upstairs to his room. He woke to that same smell of smoke, and the flames were already raging in the hall, dividing his room from his grandparents’ with an insurmountable wall of flame. He was able to escape through his bedroom window, ran to the neighbors’ and pounded his fists on their doors. He remembers looking up at the cold, indifferent sky, the smoke swirling into it. By the time the fire trucks came, it was too late. His grandparents, their whole beautiful, careful life, were gone.

He finds the box of matches nearby, lights them on the countertop with shaking hands, appreciating the fire’s awesome and terrible power. Wisps of smoke twist toward the ceiling. He runs a finger through the flame.