James Wembly was the kind of man who arrived four minutes early to everything and apologized for it, as though punctuality were a small rudeness he kept failing to correct. He was already at the table when Ethan came in, already had the bad corner booth they always took, already had two coffees going, one of them pushed across to Ethan's side and going cold in exactly the way Ethan liked it.

"You changed your route," James said, before Ethan had sat down.

"I didn't."

"You came in from the lot side. You never come in from the lot side." James said it without looking up from whatever he was writing on the back of a receipt, which was the other thing about James, he was always writing on the back of something, the world's least organized record-keeper. "Something's off with you. You've got the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You've had the face for a week." James finally looked up. He had the kind of eyes that made you feel you'd been caught at something even when you hadn't, which was probably why Ethan had told him more over the years than he'd told anyone, and still not the real thing, not the one thing. "Sit. Drink your sad lukewarm coffee. Tell me what's wrong, or don't, and we'll both pretend that worked."

Ethan sat. He drank the coffee. It was exactly right, and that small correctness, a friend who knew how he took his coffee after eleven years, almost undid him in a way he couldn't have explained, because he was suddenly and stupidly aware of how few people were left who knew anything about him at all. The honest number was one, and he was sitting across the booth, turning a pen over, pretending to read a receipt. If Ethan simply stopped - stopped coming, stopped answering, stopped being a man other people had to account for - there was exactly one person on the earth who would feel the shape of the gap.

"Do you ever," Ethan started, and stopped.

James waited. That was his gift. He didn't fill silences. He let them sit there and get uncomfortable and do their work, the way a good fisherman lets the line sit.

"Do you ever get a thought," Ethan said, "that doesn't feel like it's yours."

"Constantly. I'm married."

"James."

"Sorry. Go on. A thought that isn't yours." He set the pen down, which meant he was listening, really listening, and Ethan felt the pull to say it, the whole thing, the counter and the phone and the woman on the screen and the velvet voice on the radio, the way the same small idea had come at him from four directions in a week like water finding the low place in a floor.

And he felt the old machinery start up instead. The smoothing-over. The setting-down.

"Forget it," Ethan said. "I'm not sleeping. It makes me morbid."

Something moved across James's face, there and gone, and for years afterward Ethan would come back to this moment and not be able to say what it was, only that it looked, in retrospect, like a man hearing his own future read aloud in a language he didn't yet speak.

"Okay," James said gently. He picked the pen back up. "But for the record, you do that thing where you ask the door if you can come in and then you close it yourself." He went back to his receipt. "One of these days you're going to ask me something real, and I'm going to fall out of this booth from shock, and you'll have to explain to the paramedics that you killed me with sincerity."

Ethan laughed, and it was a real laugh, and that was the thing he'd think about later too. That the last fully ordinary hour of his life had a real laugh in it. That he hadn't known to hold onto it. Nobody ever does. That's not a failing either. It's just the price of the ticket.

They talked about nothing for a while. The nothing was the point. It was the best hour Ethan would have for a long time, and he spent it the way everyone spends those hours, which is to say carelessly, generously, with no idea what it was worth.

Outside, across the street, a man Ethan would not meet for another month stood reading a notebook that was not his own, and did not look up, and did not come in. But that's later.

For now there were two friends in a bad corner booth, and the coffee was right, and one of them was already, very quietly, beginning to disappear.