The hook by the door now has four things on it, which is three more than a hook four inches from a light switch was meant to bear.

The vest. My mother’s spare cardigan, which she left here in June and has made no attempt to retrieve. A tote bag from a hardware store. And a lanyard Deloris gave him that says VISITOR, which is not a badge, which he knows is not a badge, and which he puts on every Saturday at one o’clock like a man putting on a wedding ring.

“You’re going to have to take that off eventually,” I say.

“It’s Thursday.”

“It’s Thursday, Ash, that’s my point—”

“Renata’s on Thursdays,” he says, from the couch, without looking up from a library book about warehouse logistics, which is a sentence I would like somebody to explain to me. “If she comes in, I’d rather be wearing it.”

“She’s not going to come to my apartment.”

“Cora.” He turns a page. “I’ve been ambushed in worse rooms.”

This is week ten. This is what week ten looks like: a hook, a lanyard, a library book, and a demon on my couch reading about pallet flow.

Then my sister comes over with a shoebox.

✦ ✦ ✦

“I’ve been going back through everything,” Margot says, “because Priya said we should audit the whole process, and I’ve done tabs one through six again, and I want to show you something and I want you to not be a cow about it.”

“That’s a big ask.”

“Cora.”

“Show me.”

She opens the shoebox. Inside, in a nest of tissue paper because she is who she is, is a wooden-handled stamp about the size of a plum, with a brass face.

“That’s the stamp,” I say.

“That’s the stamp.” She sets it on the table. “That’s the one I used on all two hundred and forty. And I’ve been trying to be rigorous, so I went and found the order, because I keep my orders, and I bought it on the nineteenth of March, 2023, off Etsy, for fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents with free shipping.”

“Fourteen ninety-nine.”

“Free shipping,” says Margot, with the particular emphasis of a woman for whom this had been the deciding factor.

Ash has put the book down.

He’s looking at the stamp on my dining table, and his face has done the thing where nothing happens at all.

“Ash?”

“Turn it over,” he says.

Margot turns it over.

And I have seen this man surprised. I have seen him wrung out and held for four hours and pulled between two calls, and I have seen him cry once, at this table, over a hedge. I have never seen the thing that happens to his face when he looks at the brass face of a craft stamp my sister bought for fourteen ninety-nine.

“Ash.”

“Where did you get this,” he says.

It isn’t loud. It’s the opposite of loud.

“I told you, I got it off—”

“Margot.” And the temperature in my apartment drops four degrees, all at once, and the light over the table flickers, and my sister goes absolutely white. “Where did you get this.”

“Ash.” I’m on my feet. “Ash, look at me.”

He looks at me.

It takes about three seconds for the human to come back on, and it comes back on badly, in pieces, and when he’s done he puts both hands flat on the table like a man steadying furniture.

“I apologise,” he says, to Margot. “That was unforgivable. I’d like to explain, and then you can decide whether you want to be in a room with me.”

✦ ✦ ✦

“It’s my name,” he says.

Nobody says anything.

“That’s my name,” says Ash. “That’s what’s on it. That’s what’s pressed into the top of two hundred and forty candles in little organza bags. Not a summoning mark, not a sigil, there’s no such thing, that’s all — that’s costume. That’s what people who don’t know anything draw on things.” He hasn’t moved his hands. “It’s a name. Written down. And it works the way a name works, which is that if you put it on a thing and you want hard enough while you’re holding it, the thing it names has to answer.”