Chapter 10: What the Radiator Knows

The radiator speaks in three beats.

Not a rhythm anyone composed — not designed, not deliberate — just the consequence of water moving through ninety-year-old iron at a pressure the building's original engineers could not have anticipated and would probably have found alarming. Three beats and a rest. Three beats and a rest. He has learned to hear the rest as punctuation rather than silence, the way you learn to read the space between words rather than just the words themselves.

He knows this flat by its frequencies.