Martin Cole Albrecht

You are standing in Frank Whitcomb's kitchen, in the dark, and your knees ache in a way that is not yours. A freight handler's knees. The tile is cold through his socks. Thirty-nine minutes ago you were Patrick Dwyer, and you remember that body with a clarity that embarrasses you: the fryer-oil smell in his hair, the leg that would not quit bouncing, the way he prayed at red lights.

You were him for three minutes. In that time you found the thing in his phone, the message he was not meant to read, or had written, and you could not stand to be inside it. That is all you will say. Frank has a glass of water in his hand and a quiet house, and none of it is enough. You put the glass down. The wanting is plain, and you do not name it. You open the page with the wheel.

You pay. You spin.

The air goes out of the kitchen and into a bathroom. No travel, no warning. Your thumb is lit white, and the phone is under your chin. Your own eyes, which are not yours, hold you in the glass, blue, wet at the rims, and you are in the middle of a number: forty-one, forty-two. Your lips are still shaping it. The count has settled into a rhythm you never set.

His breath is slow and wide in a belly that pushes the sweatshirt out. The floor is small cold tile under bare feet. The mustache is thick on your upper lip, and when you breathe through your nose it moves.

Your left hand finds the edge of the vanity. Laminate, cool and slightly sticky. It gives you a night: a little girl on this very mat, fever-hot, and him kneeling with a washcloth saying *it's okay, it's okay* in a voice built for juries and failing completely. Fear that was love. Three children, and he knows each one's cough.

The sweatshirt cuff rubs your wrist. Soft, pilled, old. It was a Father's Day gift, a handprint inked on the inside of the hem by someone small. He put it on tonight in the dark so he would not wake his wife, one sleeve and then the other, and the cotton smelled of her detergent. Your shoulders ache where he carried a briefcase for twenty years. The ring on your left hand warms against the vanity. A courthouse hallway comes back: a client weeping, and him saying *I'll do everything I can*, knowing it would not be enough.

Then the phone, heavy and slick. His thumb knows the screen. It opens onto the thing he was reading, what he was not meant to, and the dread arrives in his chest before the words do, a fist under the sternum. He loves someone and he is afraid of what he has found. The light holds dead level, and you do not drop it.

You lower the phone. You turn your right hand over under the dim glow, the wide palm and the blunt fingers, the band on the other. Then you look up into the glass, at his face, which is yours now.

"Sixty-one," you say, quietly. "Sixty-two."

You wonder how long you get to keep this one, and whether it will still fit by morning.