“Tell you what. Just come back tomorrow. Think about it overnight. Come back and let me know.” He pauses, letting his rush of words and proposition settle. “My name is Ashish.”

“Simon,” says Simon. He bundles his coat up and walks out into the rain, hurrying to catch up with Vera.

She is waiting for him under the overhang of a newly built parking ramp two blocks down. She hugs her body and shivers. When she sees Simon she stops moving and looks at him coldly. Simon is still forty feet from her when he looks up. He stops walking and squints into the rain unsure if she’s seen him, to see if he has time to turn around or duck into a side street, another store, anywhere other than the open run of concrete between them—gravel, sand, water and cement mix, three-to-one, laid in, leveled with a two-by-four, troweled, and cracking under the weight of the seasons and the travel of people, the mass of their histories and emotions.

She snickers and shakes her head, toeing out the remainder of her smoldering cigarette.

Simon knows he has been discovered and he shoves his hands in his pockets and shuffles closer with his head down.

“Hey.”

“Simon.”

“How you been keepin?”

“What you see is what you get.” She opens the clasp to her plastic purse and takes another Misty Slim from a pack and Simon scrambles in his pocket to produce a lighter.

“How long you been workin at the store?”

“You should know, tracker.”

Simon hangs his head.

“I first saw you bout a month back,” he lies.

“How long you been out?”

“About a year.”

“They finally sprung ya, huh?”

“Yeah. Finally. They figured they incarcerated all the harm outta me.”

“Well, you don’t got no more brothers to bump off.”

He glares down at her.

“Sorry, Simon. I didn’t mean it.” She looks at her cigarette and across the street and back to Simon. For the first time she seems unsure. “Since you been followin me, you might as well walk me home.”

“You don’t mind?”

“If I did, would you stop?”

“I’m gettin a job at the rug store next door.”

“There? Shit, he’s fuckin some cashier from the Rainbow Foods on Lake, right there on the rugs. Well, we gonna walk?”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

They don’t talk at first. Both look at the rain-grayed buildings and construct imaginary commentary on the weather, the cold, how the city has changed or not—which buildings have been torn down, which ones are new, which have been restored to their warehouse or shipping glory but mostly sit empty, studded with boutiques and coffee shops like scattered mold.