I bought the wine from the corner shop two streets from the building.
The man behind the counter — old, unhurried, with the expression of someone who had been selling wine to people in various states of personal crisis for thirty years and had learned not to ask — handed me the bottle and said: "Good choice."
"I'm not making a choice," I said. "I'm bringing wine to dinner."
"That's a choice," he said.
I paid for it and left.
He wasn't wrong.
---
Floor four smelled like garlic and something warm and complex that I could not immediately identify, which told me he had been cooking for longer than the thirty minutes since we'd left Draven's building — which meant he had planned this before I agreed to it.
I filed that under things I was done not examining.
I knocked twice and once.
H
