She chews, because it's in her mouth. Then she takes the rest of the triangle out and holds it, buttered side up, like a thing somebody's handed her at a funeral.
"Frank's paid a man to kill me," Kit says.
Owen's hand is still in the air where the toast was. He brings it down onto the counter, onto the sticky bit by the kettle, and keeps it there.
"You what?"
"At four o'clock. He took his glasses off first." She's laughing, or doing whatever's next door to laughing. "He folded them, Owen. He put them in his top pocket like he was going for his passport photo, and then he said it like he was telling me my label was sticking up."
That's not how Frank said it to him. To him, in October, with the bureau lid down and the money on it in elastic bands, Frank said: When my heart stops. Not a minute before.
Five thousand pounds, in fifties and twenties, from a drawer that smelled of old envelopes. No bank. Frank was very clear about the bank. Sixty thousand more, coming, in the will. Owen took it home in a carrier bag from the Spar and counted it four times on his bed, and every time it came out the same, and every time it felt like more.
"Was he joking?" Owen says. His voice is fine. His voice is lovely, actually. He's always been able to do his voice.
"He wasn't joking. I did his pupils."
"Morphine, though. They get—"
"That's what I said. He said, I'm entirely myself." She does Frank, badly, all posh vowels and chin. It's so terrible that Owen's mouth goes up at one side before he can stop it, and she sees, and she laughs properly, and then she's crying, all at once, like a tap when the washer's gone.
He gets the kitchen roll. He tears off three sheets, folds them in half, and puts them in her hand on top of the toast. She blows her nose on the lot.
Frank never said he'd tell her.
Frank said, she'll never know a thing about it, son, that's the kindness of it. Frank said, you're good with people, you'll make it easy for her. And Owen walked out of that farmhouse into the yard and threw up behind the barn, quietly, and then drove back to town and paid the holding deposit and the first month on a two-bedroom flat on Calder Road, into his own bank, in two lots, because he didn't know how else you do it. One thousand four hundred and fifty pounds. With his name on it. He thinks about those two lots every night. Three thousand five hundred and fifty left in a boot box under his bed, and the deposit sitting in a bank with a computer that remembers everything.
"Did he say who?" Owen says.
Kit wipes her face with the back of her wrist, toast and all. "No."
"Did he say anything? About him? Like, what he looks like, or how he knows—"
"He said," says Kit, and gets her breath, "he's closer than you'd like."
Owen laughs.
He doesn't mean to. It comes up out of him like a hiccup, one bark, and his hand on the counter presses so hard his wrist hurts. Kit looks at him.
"Sorry. Sorry, love. It's just. Closer than you'd like. Who says that? That's out of a film. That's Michael Caine." He does it, the Michael Caine, closer than you'd like, and it's good, his Michael Caine's always been good, and Kit snorts snot into the kitchen roll and says, "Don't," and he says, "Sorry," and means it.
She tells him the rest while he puts more bread in. He can't stand still, so he does the bread. She tells him she picked a pillow up.
"I didn't do anything with it. I just had it. Then I put it back and did the corners."
"Course you did."
"And he said—" She stops. "If I did it, his heart stops. So then the man comes. So I've got to keep him going, Owen. Him."
"You'd keep him going anyway," Owen says. "You're a nurse."
"That's what he said."
The toast pops. Owen jumps, and covers it by catching the toast, which is hot, and saying ow, and shaking his fingers, and Kit says, "Butterfingers," and blows her nose again.
He knows this house now. Three weeks. The third stair creaks and the eighth one doesn't. She sleeps till two after a night, on her front, one arm off the side of the bed like a kid, with the door open because the handle sticks. He knows where she keeps the spare key, and her bank card, and the paracetamol, and which drawer the big knives live in. He didn't go looking. It's just what you learn when you live with somebody and you're tidy. He'd like to not know it.
Frank gave him her name in October. Kathleen Mulvaney, Albion Street. There's a card in the Spar window, Frank said. Room to let. Go and look at the room. And Owen went and looked at the card in the Spar window, in her round handwriting, with a smiley face on it, honest to God, a smiley face, and he rang the number the way you'd ring about a job, and she said, oh you sound nice, come round. Four hundred a month, cash. She didn't even ask for references. She asked if he minded a cat that wasn't hers coming in through the window.
His phone goes on the side. Not that phone. The proper one.
It's Leanne's number, and it's a video call, and it's twenty to nine, which means it's the school run, which means it's Maisie, and he looks at Kit with her face all blotched, and Kit says, "Answer it, you daft thing," and pushes his hand.
"Daddy!"
She's in the back of Leanne's car in her book-bag-and-bobble-hat face, all nose. Seven, and she holds the phone like it owes her money.
"Hiya, Maisie Moo. Where are you?"
"In the car. Mummy says I can have two minutes. Do the seagull."
So he does the seagull. He does the seagull who's had his chips nicked, the angry one from Scarborough, and he does it big, flapping one arm, and Maisie screams with joy, and behind him he hears Kit go, a wet laugh, out of her nose. Maisie hears it too.
"Who's that?"
"That's Kit. It's her house. Say hello."
Kit leans into the picture with her mascara down to her chin and waves the kitchen roll. "Hiya, Maisie."
Maisie looks at her for a long moment, the way she looks at things, all of her.
"Why are you crying?"
"I've had a long night," says Kit. "I'm a nurse."
"Did somebody die?"
"Not yet," Kit says, and then she puts her hand over her mouth, and Maisie says, "Daddy, do the seagull again," and he does the seagull again, and from the front seat Leanne's voice says, "Shoes, Maisie, we're here," and then, in a different voice, "Don't be late Saturday, Owen."
"I'm never late," he says. "Tell her I'm never late."
The screen goes to Leanne's car roof, then nothing.
Twenty days. Monday the thirtieth of November, half past two, the family court, for overnights. Every other weekend, Friday to Sunday, a bed in a room with paint on the walls she's picked herself. He's given the court this address, and the flat from the first. Twenty days to the hearing, and eleven, they're saying, for Frank. He does the sum a lot. He does the sum like other people bite their nails.
Kit is looking at him.
"She's gorgeous," she says.
"She's a nightmare."
"She's got your nose." Kit puts her bit of toast down on the plate, finally, and pushes it away. "Right. I'm going to the police."
He's ready for it. He's had his whole body ready for it since the toast went in her mouth, and still it goes through him cold, from his collar to his belt.
"Yeah?" he says.
"Yeah. That's what you do, isn't it? Somebody says they've paid someone to kill you, you go to the police. You don't sit in your kitchen eating toast."
"They'll ask you who."
"I'll tell them I don't know who. That's their job. They find who."
"And they'll go up and see him," Owen says, "and he'll be lovely to them."
"So?"
So Frank will be lovely, and they'll write it down, and they'll go away, and they'll never in a hundred years think to look in this kitchen, at the man in odd socks doing her toast. Will they? He doesn't know how police think about this sort of thing. He knows how they look at a man with a file. He knows they write things down.
He could say: he was having you on. They do that at the end. They say all sorts. He could say it nicely. She'd believe him. She likes him; she'd want to believe him. And she'd go to bed, and she'd go back up that lane tonight, and nothing would change, and nobody would write anything down.
Only she wouldn't. Not Kit. She'd lie up there staring at the ceiling till two and then ring the police anyway from her bed, in her pyjamas, and tell them her lodger said not to.
"You need someone to drive you," Owen says.
She looks up.
"You've been up all night, you'll put that car in a wall. I'll drive you. Where we going? The station on Market Street? Lovely. Ten o'clock, they're open. Have a wash. I'll do you some more toast."
"I don't want any more toast."
"You'll want it in the car," he says, and she laughs.
"Has anybody been hanging about?" she says. "Round here? Anybody weird?"
He's got his back to her, at the bread bin.
"There's a silver Audi," he says.
He hasn't planned to say it. It's true, and it's there, and she wants something. A silver Audi has been parked across the road three mornings running, outside the house with the trampoline, a man in it with a flask, and the man never gets out.
"What kind of man?" Kit says. She's sitting up. "What's he look like?"
"Bald," says Owen. "Big neck. Does a lot of sitting."
"Oh my God," says Kit, and gets her phone out, and writes it down, silver Audi, big neck, with her thumbs, and Owen puts two more slices in and stands very close to the toaster and watches the wires go orange.
Upstairs, he shuts his door and gets down on his knees on the carpet like he's going to pray, and pulls out the boot box.
The money's in there. The phone's in there, the cheap one, with one number saved in it under the letter F. He sits on the floor with his back against the bed and he types it with his thumb, and his thumb's shaking so much he gets it wrong twice. His text says, Why did you tell her.
He sends it. He watches it go. Delivered.
He waits. Through the floor he can hear Kit in the bathroom running the tap, and talking to herself, telling the taps off. Downstairs the toaster pops for nobody.
Nothing comes back.
He waits through her getting dressed and shouting up the stairs, "Owen, have you seen my other boot," and him shouting, "By the radiator," because he knows where her other boot is. He waits until his knees hurt. Nothing.
Eleven years on the ambulances. Struck off for drink. Sober twenty-two months and four days. He used to be the man who came when people were frightened. He'd come in through the door with his bag and his green trousers and he'd say, right, what have we got, and everybody in the room would unclench. He puts the phone back in the box, under the money, and the lid on, and the box back under the bed, square, with the corner lined up on the line in the carpet.
Then he goes down and gets the jam out.
She's in the hall in her coat, doing her zip, looking about twelve. He does her one last slice anyway, for the car, jam right to the edges, all the way, because Maisie says nobody else does it right, and he wraps it in kitchen roll and gives it to her on the doorstep.
"You're too good to me," Kit says.
He can't think of anything to say to that, so he does the seagull, and she hits him on the arm.
The police station on Market Street is small and beige, with a blue lamp over the door and a sign that says the front desk shuts at six. He parks the van across the road, outside the bookies. Kit sits for a minute with her hand on the door.
"Come in with me," she says.
"Somebody's got to mind the van," he says. "Double yellows."
They're not double yellows. She doesn't look. She gets out and walks across the road with her shoulders up round her ears, and she goes in, and the door swings shut behind her on its slow arm.
It's ten o'clock.
Maisie's school photo is tucked in the dashboard, up by the windscreen, where the sun's bleached the blue of her jumper nearly white. Her fringe is wonky because she cut it herself the night before. Her smile is all gaps.
Owen pulls the mirror down and looks at himself.
He tries surprised. Eyebrows up. What? Me? He tries sorry. He tries the face of a man who opens his front door to two police officers and says, oh no, is it my dad, before he remembers his dad's been dead twenty years. He tries helpful. He's very good at helpful. He holds it until it hurts his cheeks, and then he lets it go, and in the mirror there's just his face, and behind it, through the back window, the beige door, not opening.
He puts the mirror up.
He tries helpful again.