She found him on the stairs.
Not the study floor this time—the staircase itself, lowest step, knees folded up, back against the newel post. The oil lamp she was carrying gave her a second's warning before he looked up, and she used that second to settle herself.
She sat down beside him. Not on the same step—one above, so that the lamp could go on the step above that, and the light would be indirect, softer. She had learned, in the weeks since the first encounter, that direct light made the conversations shorter.
"Can't sleep," she said. Not a question.
"Noisy," he said. He tapped his temple with one finger—not his head, she had come to understand, but the space inside it. "In here."
"What kind of noise."
He thought about it with the particular seriousness he brought to questions. He never brushed her off. "Like everyone talking at the same time," he said. "And I can't—I don't know which voice to listen to."
She sat with that for a moment. In her previous life she had read case studies on this—the experience of dissociative identity, the way other alters sometimes registered as intrusive presences even when they weren't active. It was not a comfortable thing to know about from the inside.
"That sounds exhausting," she said.
"Yes." He glanced at her sideways. "You went away for two days."
"I did."
"Fischer said you were handling something."
"I was."
"Did you handle it."
"I did," she said. "It's being handled."
He nodded, slowly, as though the confirmation of this fact was something he needed to hear before he could let himself move on from it. "Good," he said. "I like it when things are handled."
"So do I," she said.
They sat for a while in the quiet staircase. She could hear the house breathing around them—the settling of old timbers, the faint push of wind against the upper windows. She had come to find these sounds comfortable. She had not expected that.
"Finch," he said. "Are you staying."
"Tonight?"
"In general." He was looking at his hands, not her. "Some people go away and don't come back."
She thought about how to answer this honestly—not reassuringly, not practically, but honestly. "I don't have plans to go anywhere," she said. "And I'd give notice, if that changed. You'd know before it happened."
He seemed to consider this. "Okay," he said, with the particular finality of a child who has received a satisfactory answer and is ready to move on. "Okay." He uncurled himself from the step, stood, stretched in the unselfconscious way he had—so different from the contained, careful movements of the earl. "Goodnight, Finch."
"Goodnight," she said.
She sat on the staircase after he'd gone, listening to his footsteps diminish above her and then stop. The house resettled.
She thought about what Fischer had told her the morning she returned from Brown's house—about him standing in the snow garden for the better part of an hour, waiting for someone he couldn't name. About the particular confusion of waking in a self that wasn't the one you'd been when you last went to sleep, and reaching for something familiar, and not finding it.
The lamp flickered. She turned it down and went to bed.