“Your heart. I always feel it racing. Like a little bird in a cage. From the first time I held you.” He takes a drag on the cigarette. “I still remember: You were just a baby. I held you to my chest, and I could feel your heart beating. Right through my shirt. Fluttering, just like a bird’s.”

She crosses the room to the fireplace. Everything is humming. She stuffs the hearth with tinder and limbs of kindling wood and strikes a match. Smoke swirls up in a thread. Her thoughts spin. He doesn’t know anything. Where you’ve been. Who you were with.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.

He says, “You’re a good girl.”

The kindling catches fire. Flame shadows shift along the fine paper on the walls.

She turns. “Are you hungry?”

She knows this device of his. This cat and mouse.

To trick.

To catch or be caught.

“I’ll make you some soup,” she says. “Clam chowder?”

He leans back. Studying her. His face aglow in the fire. Those eyes. Serene.

“Tell me something,” he says.

“What?”

“If you had one thing in the world that mattered to you, would you ever give it up?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What would make you give it up?”

She stares at him.

“I’m talking about weakness,” he says.

She watches him. Watches him study her in the capering light. She is undisturbed. In order. She puts her whole mind into it.

He smiles. “I thought you might want to say something. To convince me.”

“Convince you of what?”

“Convince me of everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

He lowers the cigarette to the tray on the side table, taps off the ashes. He looks at the fire. “We all come into this world untainted by experience. Pure. Without defect. Six trillion cells of impeccable biology. Molecules and protein. Then existence starts in. It’s just life. The big game. Feel, hope, dream. The heart gets caught up. It begins to care. Dreams break, hopes shatter. Love is lost. That immaculate luster dims. There’s the damage, Ava. The weakness. Life breaks the perfect mold we started from, and we dull, and we tarnish. We are all dark shells of that once lustrous start. There is no way around it.” He pauses, clears his throat. “Except one.”

She waits. She does not ask the question. What he wants her to ask.

Time is slow. Tick.

Tick.

He looks at her. The blue eyes clear as water. Halcyon. “You become impervious.”

She flusters. “How do you do that?”

“Like anything else. You practice.”

Wind gusts up and shakes the windows softly. The fire crackles. He does not pull his gaze from her.

“I’m going to make you some soup.”

“I’ve cut you off,” he says. “Your money. Debit card, bank account. You don’t have anything now. Except me.”

Silence.