The flat smelled like dust and endings.

Three weeks since the funeral, and I still hadn't opened the windows. Couldn't, really. The frames were painted shut, had been for years, and Dad never got around to fixing them. He never got around to fixing anything. The kitchen tap dripped. The hall light flickered. The front door stuck unless you shouldered it just right.

I knew the exact pressure needed. I'd grown up shouldering that door.

The boxes were the worst part. Not because there were so many, though there were, stacked floor to ceiling in the spare room and crammed under the bed and piled on every flat surface. The worst part was what was in them. Newspapers from 1987. A clock with no hands. Receipts for things I couldn't identify. Three broken radios. A shoe, singular, men's size nine, no mate.

My father's life, reduced to things nobody wanted.

I pulled another box from the wardrobe shelf. Heavy. The cardboard damp at the corners, softened by years of neglect. Inside: a tangle of extension cords, a chipped mug with World's Best printed on it (the rest had worn away), and at the bottom, wrapped in a handkerchief, something small and round.

A coin. Or not a coin. The wrong weight for a coin, the wrong warmth. It sat in my palm like a living thing, heavy and humming, inscribed with marks I couldn't read. Not any language I recognized, and I worked in a library. I'd seen most of them.

I turned it over. The marks on the back were different from the front. Deeper. They caught the light wrong, like they were carved from the inside.

I pocketed it. Added it to the mental list of Dad's inexplicable possessions, somewhere between box of keys that fit no locks and fourteen identical blue notebooks, all blank.

By nine o'clock I'd filled six bin bags and barely made a dent. The flat still smelled like him. Wool and old paper and something underneath that, something I couldn't scrub out. Not rot. Not mould. Just absence. The specific scent of a space where someone used to be and isn't anymore.

I poured cheap wine into the chipped mug because I'd packed all the glasses, and I sat in his armchair. The springs groaned. The cushion held the shape of him still, a hollow I didn't quite fit.

The wine was terrible. I drank it anyway.

"I wish this place didn't smell like death."

I said it to nobody. To the stained ceiling. To the dripping tap marking seconds in the kitchen.

The air shifted.

Not a breeze. The painted-shut windows held. Something else. The temperature in the room ticked up by one degree, then two. The dust motes suspended in the lamplight went perfectly still, as if the air itself had stopped breathing.

Then a voice from the kitchen doorway.

"Done."

I dropped the mug. Wine spread across the carpet in a dark stain shaped roughly like a question mark.

A man stood in the kitchen.

Tall, sharp, pale in a way that made the lamplight look dirty. He was watching me with eyes the wrong color, amber-gold, catching light from a source I couldn't identify. He tilted his head. The movement was precise. Not human-precise. Something else.

"Though the smell was grief, not death," he said. "I removed what I could."

I looked at the wine. At my hands. At him.

"Right," I said.

My voice was flat. The voice one uses to ask a stranger for the salt.

He looked at the spreading stain on the carpet. He looked at the chipped mug rolling slow across the floorboards. He looked at me again.

"You are calmer than most."

"I haven't decided you're real yet."

"Reasonable."

He stepped into the room. One step. Just enough that the lamplight caught the angles of his face properly. He had a coat that didn't belong to any decade I could place. His shoes were impossibly clean.

"I am not a hallucination," he said. "The wine, however, is generally terrible. You should not drink it."

I picked up the mug from the floor. There was about a swallow left. I drank it. He watched me with the patience of something that had been cataloguing mortals for centuries and had, only just now, encountered an error.

"What are you," I said.

He paused. The pause had weight. As if he were considering several truths and choosing the one that gave nothing away.

"I am a fae."

"A fairy."

"I would prefer you did not use that word."

I laughed. Short, surprised. The sound landed strange in the empty flat. The sound landed strange in the empty flat. I had not heard it, in this room, for three weeks.

"What are you doing in my kitchen, fae?"

"You wished. I answered."

The token in my pocket pulsed, faintly, against my hip. Warm. Heavier than it had been.

"I wished it didn't smell like death," I said. "How does that bring a strange man to my kitchen?"

"I am the answering. Your wish required a Rearrangement. I performed it."

"Of what."

He looked at me steadily. The lamp behind him made a halo of his hair, ridiculous, and the rest of his face was in shadow except for those eyes.

"The grief, holder," he said. "I cannot remove it. I moved it. It lives now in a small cupboard behind the kettle. You may retrieve it if you find you wanted it back."

I sat in the chair. The sitting was involuntary.

"Holder," I said.

"Yes."

"Of what."

"Of me."

He glanced down at my pocket. Where the token sat humming against my hip.

I put my hand over it instinctively. The metal was warmer than my skin, which was not how metal was supposed to behave.

"Right," I said again.

He waited. His hands stayed at his sides. He did not move further into the room. He had the patience of something ancient that had learned, through long practice, to wait for permission.

The cushion under me held the shape of my father. The hollow that didn't fit.

I looked at the strange man in my kitchen. At the wine on the carpet. At the painted-shut windows that had not been opened in my lifetime.

The forward question landed like a stone dropping into still water.

What price will the next wish cost me?

I didn't say it out loud. I knew, somewhere in the same place that knew the door's exact pressure, that saying anything aloud in this flat now had consequences.

The man in my kitchen tilted his head again. The same precise movement. As if he had heard the question I had not spoken.

"That," he said quietly, "is the correct question."