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she’s gone, I give him a look.
    “ This waitress? She looks about
sixteen.”
    “Different one, actually.”
    “And is this safe to eat?” I lift a spoonful of soup. “You know
better than to piss off the person feeding you, I hope.”
    “What makes you think I pissed her off?”
    “Seems likely, let’s say.”
    He lowers his head with an amused twist of his lips and begins
to eat.
    “It wasn’t like that. Her father was the cook. He went down on
the job. Right there.” He points the top of his ceramic spoon at the kitchen
below. “Had a stroke apparently, and fell into the wok on his way down. Spilled
hot oil all over himself. The ambulance came for him and I gave his daughter a
lift to the hospital.”
    His expression doesn’t change, but I sense the reproach.
    I drop my gaze to the table. “You do have a way of making me
feel like an asshole.”
    “Eat your soup.”
    The liquid slides down my throat, tangy and unctuous. Slices of
sour cucumber float in the broth.
    “What happened to the old man?”
    Jack pours out some fresh tea. A thread of steam rises from my
cup.
    “Dead,” he says. “Probably never felt the burns at all.”
    He seems to consider this for the first time.
    He didn’t ring the doorbell when he arrived at my house earlier
this evening. By tacit agreement, we’ve already abandoned the notion of privacy.
I left the door unlocked, and he simply walked in and came looking for me as if
he owned the place, as if his previous visit had not been an illicit one.
    I was at my dresser, clasping a fine silver chain around my
neck.
    He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned his shoulder against the
wall, his sweater pushed up over his forearms. Clean jeans, clean work boots. I
wondered what he thought of my clothes, which an old boyfriend described as
having been “put together by a twelve-year-old gay boy with a boot fetish and
twenty bucks to spend.” Lots of vintage and secondhand. Little discretion.
    I cut my own hair, too. With the straight razor from my
kit.
    “So what’s that about?” he says now. “You follow guys, break
into their houses and steal shit that has no value to anyone but them. Why?
What’s so interesting?”
    “Everything.”
    He leans back, waiting.
    I set down my spoon and cup my tea in both hands, prepared with
my story this time, set to deliver it on cue with a face full of rueful
honesty.
    “Have you ever been in a crowd—at a concert, maybe, or on the
street—and noticed the way all the faces seem to blend together? But when you
pick out a single person, suddenly he’s not this anonymous guy anymore. He’s
somebody. An individual. You know?”
    Jack nods.
    “Well, I became sort of fascinated by that. I’d ask myself
questions about the guy. Like, I wonder where he lives. I wonder what’s in his
refrigerator. Or his sock drawer or DVD collection. What’s his name? How strong
are his glasses? What’s in his medicine cabinet? It was a game. But after a
while, I started to wish I could check my guesses to see if they were
right.”
    “So you started breaking in.”
    “Yeah. I knew this girl once who taught me how to get into
houses. Where people hide their spare keys, how to break a window quietly. She
could get in anywhere.”
    “Who was this?”
    “Just someone from the foster system. I roomed with her at the
Center for a while. She’s a wizard, smart as hell. Anyway, I discovered that
it’s actually really easy to get in and out, provided no one’s around.”
    “You never got caught before?”
    “No.” I raise my chin. “And I wouldn’t have with you, either,
if you hadn’t picked that day to forget your phone or whatever.”
    He looks at me skeptically. It’s impossible to tell which part
of my story he isn’t buying. I pretend not to see the doubt in his eyes. I’m
locked into my bluff now and need to ride it out.
    “And is it only men who interest you?” he says.
    “Yes.”
    “Never followed a woman?”
    “No.”
    “Why