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beats. He remembered the papers he’d meant to finish and raised his arms over his head in a stretch, showing his length. His shirt lifted to expose inches of his skin above his belt. He meant this display to be nothing subtle to Mira—or to Wilton.
    â€œTime to wrap it up,” he said. He tried to meet Mira’s eye but she looked away, though it was clear she understood exactly what his gesture was about: I want you to leave this man and come to bed with me.
    â€œI have to be up in a few hours,” Owen said to Wilton. “You have to go home now.”
    â€œThat’s rude,” Mira said, and laughed.
    â€œNo. Of course it isn’t. It’s late. I understand.” Wilton sprung from the couch. “Sometimes I forget people actually get up in the morning, get going, have jobs and do things, be productive.” Nothing was slumped or wrinkled about him, nothing tired. “That was a wonderful dinner. You don’t know how long it’s been since I had a meal at anyone’s table, in anyone’s house. I’d forgotten how significant it is. And I’m just a man who barged in, out of nowhere. My excellent luck, it seems.”
    â€œWhat will you do tomorrow?” Mira asked. Her voice had an almost plaintive edge to it.
    Wilton slipped his hands into loose pockets. “You’re wondering about my plans, why I’m here.”
    â€œYes, but it’s none of my business,” Mira said. “Forget it.”
    â€œNo, it is your business. I’m you neighbor, you should know these things.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “I have a daughter, Anya. She’s moving here in a few weeks, starting medical school.”
    â€œShe’ll be living with you?” Mira asked.
    â€œWell, not at first. I hope at some point soon, but for now, no. To start, I’m just hoping to see her from time to time.” There was more to say, but not tonight, his indulgent expression suggested, another dose of seduction soon to come.
    Owen inched Wilton to the front door and walked with him to the sidewalk. Whittier Street was overhung by oak and linden branches. The musk of aroused boxwoods and now the drifting perfume of the lilacs in the yard, was the season’s return and softened Owen toward Wilton. There was something about the man that made Owen think he might understand how the murk of sadness could blur the stars. When he was a kid on a night like this, he told Wilton, he would smell the slime of tadpoles and hear the ferns unfurling around the pond where he grew up and believe that everything was possible in his life. Later, a night like this had shown him how that possibility could be over when a friend had died. He looked away from Wilton, disarmed by how easily he’d offered this piece of private history to a man he wasn’t even sure he liked or trusted.
    â€œYou’re young. Life’s still all ahead for you,” Wilton said, and put a companionable hand on his shoulder. “I think you and Mira are pretty remarkable people.”
    â€œYou don’t know us.” Owen balked at the easy flattery.
    The houses surrounding them were dark and fortified in sleep, except for Alice Jessup’s. Alice was over a hundred, Owen said as they walked past Wilton’s, a friend of Mira’s grandmother who was now attended by round-the-clock nurses who placed alien green nightlights in the hallways as if to give their charge a glimpse of her spectral future. At the end of Whittier, on the corner of Hope, chain link confined the high school. The clock was frozen in its peeling tower. Owen pointed across Hope and deep into the expensive, leafy neighborhood where Spruance Middle School sat like a stripped and broken car on a grassless hill. It had been abandoned by its neighbors years ago, he told Wilton, and was now populated by poor kids who were bused in from harder parts of the city. Children who weren’t white, he meant.
    They