"Sit," Dilly said.

He did not sit. He had the air of a man who had never in his life been told to by a stranger in a wet room and was working out the protocol. She took the chair from beside the sleeping customer's empty spot, the orange plastic one with the cracked leg, and set it behind his knees, and put one flat hand against his sternum and pushed. It was like pushing a coat on a hanger. He sat.

"That was very direct," he said.

"You were about to fall on my mother's floor. She said so."

"I did say so," said Gulnora Karimova, and went to the little kitchen behind the counter, and Dilly heard the kettle go on, which meant the matter had been decided at a level above her.

He was cold. She had noticed it when she touched him and noticed it again as she crouched in front of the chair and looked at his hands. The nails had a faint blue under the pink. His pulse in the side of his neck was fast and then, for a beat she counted, not there at all, and then fast again, as if the body were trying to make up for lost time. She had done two first-aid recertifications a year for six years. She knew what a man looked like when his heart was misbehaving, and she knew what a man looked like when he was concealing it, and this was both.

"Do you have medication on you?"

"Mrs. Halvorsen-Duarte has it. In the car." The car was at the kerb. She had seen it through the glass without looking: dark, long, a driver standing beside it with his hands folded in front. "I am quite well. I'd like that understood. I am tired."

"You're grey."

"It is a dignified grey."

"Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke."

"Sel."

"I'm going to ask you one question, and I'd like the answer to be the one that is true, because I will find out. Are you going to collapse in the next hour?"

He looked at her for a moment. His eyes were a very dark brown and very tired, and there was something in them she had seen in clients before, the thing that wanted to be reassuring because reassurance was cheaper than fear. Then it went out of his face.

"Probably not," he said.

"That is the first honest thing you've said."

"I have said several."

"You said a dignified grey."

"That was a joke. It's different."

Her mother returned with three glasses of tea on a tin tray, set one in his hands without asking, and stood over him until he drank. Rustam hovered by the dead dryer, enormous with silent excitement, mouthing something at his sister that she was fairly sure was Fairhold, Fairhold, FAIRHOLD. Dilly gave him a look that meant leave, and he went as far as the vending machine and began studying the chips.

"Ona," Dilly said to her mother, quietly. "The notice. I told you it was an advertisement."

"I read it before you were home from the gym." Her mother's English was careful and unhurried, a language she carried the way she carried groceries, one bag at a time. "I have read every letter from Fairhold for fifteen years. You think I do not know what a balloon is? In Tashkent we had balloon. It is the same: one day it is pretty and then it explodes."

"You knew, and you didn't say anything."

"You did not say anything. I thought, she is protecting me. All right. I let you protect me. It gave you something to do." She said it without malice, almost fondly, and Dilly felt it land somewhere under her ribs and stay. "Now a man arrives who says he has fixed it. Maybe he has. I want to know what he wants. Everything costs. Only the price changes."

"I'd like to know that too," Dilly said.

"Then ask," said her mother, and went to stand by the counter with her arms folded, the way she watched a customer she suspected of using the wrong detergent.

Sel set down the tea. When he spoke it was in the full, careful paragraphs again, like a man picking his way across a floor. "You are quite right to ask. I'll try to be brief, which is not one of my gifts. My grandmother, Odessa Thornquist, founded Fairhold Mutual sixty-one years ago with a loan from the Ferrymen's Union and a refusal to behave. She held the controlling stake in a trust. When she retired, officially, eleven years ago, the stake did not change hands, because of a clause she wrote into the trust. It says the stake can only be held by what it calls a Keeper. The Keeper must be married. The Keeper must sign the Nightly Close, in person, at the vault desk at eleven fifty-eight, every night. Not an eighth of a minute late, not a night missed, not a signature on someone's behalf. Witnessed by the Vault Clerk. If one night goes unsigned, or the Keeper is single, or dead without an heir who is both married and ready to sign, the stake goes to the Fairhold Foundation board."

"Which is run by?"

"My uncle Maurice." He said the name with a perfect, polite blankness, like a man declining a canapé. "Who is warm and generous and has wanted, since I was nine, to sell the bank to a national concern called Ardent. You may have seen their billboards. The smiling ones. 'Banking, simplified.'"

"I've seen them."

"Then you know what simplified means." He turned the glass a quarter turn in his hands. "I have been the sole heir since the age of twenty-two, because my father died. I have not been married, because my grandmother expected me to be married to the bank. She changed her mind about that around Christmas. It's a tidy little trap, and she left me thirty days to walk into it."

"Why me?"

He was quiet. "Because of what you did not do," he said. "Fourteen months ago. I have watched that clip more times than I should admit. I do not see a woman who flinched. I see someone standing absolutely still while the room moves around her, which is a thing I can recognise. I thought: that is somebody who will not run. And I thought, if she does run, she will tell me first."

"That's a lot to read off seven seconds."

"It is," he agreed. "I'm hoping to be corrected."

She did not know what to do with that, so she did what she always did with an unexploded object. She put distance and paper around it. "I want the will," she said. "The actual text of it. Not your summary of it, Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke. Your summary is very good, and I don't trust it, because it's too good."

"Sel," he said, wearily, and put a hand into his jacket and drew out a folded sheaf. "I thought you might ask. It is a photocopy of the operative pages. The original is in the vault."

She took it to the folding table under the good light, where the lint was, and the smell of hot cotton, and read.

It was not easy to read. Odessa Thornquist had written with the confidence of someone who had never been interrupted. THE KEEPER shall be a natural person of the blood of the Founder, married at the time of succession and for the duration of tenure, who shall sign the Nightly Close in the Founder's hand. Six clauses down: THE CONSORT, being the spouse of the Keeper, shall be bound by the same trust, and shall CO-SIGN the Close in the event of the Keeper's incapacity, and in that event shall hold all powers of the Keeper. Dilly read the clause twice. She read the next two sentences three times.

"This says," she said slowly, "that if you can't sign, your wife signs. And holds all your powers."

"Yes."

"All. The whole bank."

"For as long as I'm incapacitated, yes. I'd have preferred to explain that part more gently. It's the reason the arrangement has to be real in the eyes of the law. A marriage on paper that can be annulled by Maurice's lawyers on the first Tuesday is no use to me. You would be, in the strictest sense, my deputy. It's an enormous amount of power to hand to a stranger, and I do not hand it lightly. I'm only handing it because the alternative is handing it to him."

She lifted her head. "And what do I get?"

"Salary. A great deal of it. The shop's debt, cancelled whatever you say tonight. Your mother's name cleared from every Fairhold file. Your brother's channel does not exist as far as I'm concerned, which means I will not interfere with it, and I would be grateful if he did not mention my pulse."

From the vending machine, Rustam said, very quietly, "I wasn't going to."

"What do I give?" Dilly said.

Sel hesitated. It was the first time he had. "A year," he said. "And a signature. And, I'm afraid, your face. They will say terrible things about you. They have already begun."

"They've had fourteen months of practice," said Dilly. "I'm very hard to disappoint."

He laughed. It came out short and surprised, as if it had slipped past a guard, and it turned into a cough, and the cough went on a beat too long, and she had her hand on his shoulder before she knew she had moved. He waved her off, and she did not take the hand away until he breathed.

At the window, something moved.

She was across the room before the thought finished. It was a habit older than the shame: eyes to the glass, always, the corner of every room. Dray Street, empty and wet and lit orange by the lamp. The phone-repair shop dark. The church that was a gym with one light on in the back. And at the edge of the lamp's circle, going away quickly and not running, a figure in a rain jacket with the hood up, one arm held a little close to the chest, the way you hold a phone you've just put away.

"Someone was at the window," she said.

"Ah," said Sel. He did not seem surprised. He seemed sad.

Her own phone buzzed against the table. Then Rustam's, in his hand, a long vibration, and Sel's, in his jacket, and the one on the counter, her mother's old flip phone, which had not rung since Easter. She picked hers up.

A notification from Murmur, the app where the entire town went to be wrong about itself. Trending, 12:38 a.m. A photograph, slightly blurred, taken through glass: a man in a suit, seated, one hand gripping the edge of a folding table with his head bowed. A woman crouched in front of him. The caption was posted by an account called @ferrywatch, with a skull-and-bank emoji.

BREAKING?? Fairhold heir collapses at laundromat, pulse CHECKED by the Flinch Girl. Is the king already dying? Closed. Sleep well. #Keeper

The counter beside it said eleven thousand views. She watched, and while she watched it said fourteen.

"That," Sel said, quietly, from behind her, "will be my uncle's."

"You don't know that."

"I know the rhythm." He stood, with the table's help, and for the first time he met her gaze without any courtesy in it at all, only the plain terror of a man who has run out of room. "He has had a man outside my windows for a month. He has been waiting for me to be seen. Now I have been seen. Ms. Karimova, tomorrow morning, my cousins on the board will call this a medical event. By Friday they will call it unfitness. I asked you if you could watch me die. I should have asked first whether you could bear to be told I am not."