The name on his mail is Ray Keller and has been since 2007. He took it the same week he arranged the accident that ended the man he used to be, and he has been careful with it ever since — steady employment, a mortgage he pays on time, a van with a magnetic sign, a knee he mentions often enough that people stop noticing the way he moves.

He is genuinely good at the window job. That matters. Eighteen years is long enough that the cover is not a cover any more; it is most of his life. He likes the estimates, likes the drive between them, likes being a man whose worst problem is a customer who wants a bay window in a wall that can't take one.

Before

He was in a unit that did not have a name people said out loud. Task-organised, run out of a programme office that closed itself in the same eighteen months it spent closing its operators. Eleven men. In 2006 they were given a target list that was wrong, and they did the work anyway, and what was on the ground afterwards was not what the list had said would be there.

Nobody answered for it. Instead the programme began to tidy. A car went off a road in Virginia. A heart attack at forty-one. A house fire in Georgia with the smoke alarms taken down. Ray sat with it for four months, counting, and then did the one thing the tidy-up has no answer for: he got to himself first.

He is not tortured about the work. That would be easier. What he is, is a man who found out he could put it down and live like everyone else, and has spent eighteen years quietly proud of that, and is about to discover that he put it down the way you put down something that is only sleeping.

Now

He goes to get Casey because there is nothing else to do. He tells himself he will do it as a father — talk to the man, pay what can be paid, be reasonable. He gets about two days into being reasonable.

The tell, when it comes, is not violence. It's the tidiness. A normal man who did what Ray does that night would leave a mess, panic, call someone. Ray cleans up. He cleans up out of habit, the way you wipe a counter, and the habit is what goes in the report, and the report is what reaches the people who have his file.

He knows it the moment he does it. That's the worst part — he watches himself do the careful thing and understands, standing there, exactly what it has just cost him.