Chapter 14: The Figure Wears Edmund's Coat

The coat was wrong.

Dorian saw it from the third floor at seven minutes past three in the morning, through the gap he kept between the curtain's edge and the window frame — a gap of precisely four inches, which was enough to see the pavement and the streetlight and the figure without being seen in return, or so he had calculated, and he had been calculating such things for rather longer than most people had been calculating anything.

He had not been sleeping. He did not sleep, precisely, though he had learned to approximate the horizontal stillness that sleeping bodies require of their neighbors, and he had been lying in that approximation when something changed in the quality of the dark outside — not a sound, not quite, but a shift in the building's attention, the way old buildings have of registering what happens at their perimeter before their tenants do.