He shook his head. “Afraid of heights. Always have been.”

I’d never known this. But I suppose it made sense that I hadn’t realized. I’d known him in a flat town, full of strip malls and single-story trailers, no heights for miles. I could remember something about his father forcing him onto the tallest roller coaster in Vegas, but I’d never been sure which part he’d been scared of. He’d cried just telling me about that shaking coaster, how the city lights went blurry from distance—he was so far up, like a terrible bird—and how his tears blurred everything even more. I thought he’d been afraid of the speed, or maybe of his father, who was never a cruel man, just had a lot of hopes and only one son to carry them.

Abe set down the box. “My room is back here,” he said, and took me to a small room behind the kitchen. It was bare and bright, with a swivel chair, no desk, and a mattress on the floor. A laptop sat on the floor with its plug trailing behind it, like a dog on a leash. There was a tie rack on the wall, draped with shimmering bands of blue and green. There was a book on the pillow and a half-eaten bar of chocolate stuck like a bookmark between its pages. I bent closer. The book was some kind of science fiction; I saw a red planet floating in the middle of licorice space. Even as a boy, Abe liked all that stuff. He got impatient when I mixed up aliens from different movies.

Behind me, he said, “It’s kind of a bedroom-slash-office. It’s not fixed up.”

“You don’t have an office at work?”

“I do.”

“But you needed another one.”

“I needed another one.”

He’d been living here for three years, I knew from the address on his checks, and it still looked like this—barely unpacked, just a bar of chocolate to mark his place.

“The loft is for Stella,” he said. “Until she finds a place of her own. And there’s a whole basement for you. More privacy.”

He showed me downstairs: a bathroom, laundry room, and bedroom. There was more furniture down here than anywhere else in the apartment—a matching bed and dresser, a braided red carpet, a small writing desk with one lonely glass paperweight. I didn’t have any work to do at a desk like that. I had only tiny cats to arrange across the wood.

Abe set down my box. He touched his lower back briefly as he stood straight again—a moment of ache. It had been a couple years since I’d seen him—his last business trip to Reno, something to do with a tire recall—but he looked older than I’d expected.