All the buildings had multiple locks—outer locks, lobby locks, courtyard locks—and no doubt more locks, locks we couldn’t see deeper inside. Lofts were glass holes tucked inside sheer cliffs of stucco. Artists lived in this part of town, big thinkers and independently wealthy dreamers. Big windows showed elaborate tracks of industrial lighting, white canopy beds on open hardwood floors, a leaning canvas studded with dolls’ heads.

I was learning the city and our own small corner inside it. Tilly and I went to breakfast during those first weeks, as a way of exploring. But it seemed like she got tired of this, tired of talking, tired of my talking, so I started exploring alone.

I kept coming back to the Tenderloin, farther north, where whores chose corners and stood on them all night. It was a strange pleasure, watching those women, like slowing for a wreck. Their legs were skinny as twigs and just as crooked. They leaned against boarded doors in their black tights and cheap pumps: ketchup red, faded teal, the bright orange of processed cheese. I wondered if Tilly ever saw them. She was always in the apartment by sundown, tucked into her basement. Most days she was in the apartment all day long.

Abe started to meet me in the parking lot every night. I liked seeing the calm that hinged his parts together on those dark streets, where any sudden clatter made me clench my jaw. I never turned. I only flinched against turning. It’s alright to be scared. His words wriggled into me like fingers. They wanted to make a feeling inside me, of gladness or gratitude, and then claim it as their own.

I liked how he walked: shoulders squared back, hands in his pockets. I liked the size of his body. Women weren’t supposed to want these things—men saving us, dwarfing us, protecting us—but I did. I wanted to be dwarfed. His arms were solid and they gave off heat in the fog.

If I was nervous about the streets, Abe was nervous about everything else. “Are there enough towels at home?” he asked. “How’s the shower?” In his living room, boxes still stood in crooked stacks. “It’s not a real home yet,” he said. “I know.”

At home he was one person, insecure and eager to please, but once you put him up against the world, his voice sounded like a cold, bracing liquid had seeped into it, running glossy through his veins. I’ve always known how to be in public, he told me. In private I’m never sure.

“Are you happy?” he asked me one night. “Out here, I mean, with us.”

I hesitated.

“I never really knew why you came in the first place.”

“I like it here,” I said carefully. “I thought it might help Tilly. I’d hoped it would.”

I could have asked him the same thing: What made you want us here? It could have been for Tilly’s sake, and probably it was, but she was right that there was a loneliness in him. I didn’t want to face it directly. I was afraid of his candor. I thought it might come too fast.