He comes to her when he needs helps, when he has cut too deeply, when he has not cared for himself. He can't remember how he found her. It's been too many years. Perhaps she found him. He thinks to ask sometimes but says nothing.

She is always there when he needs her. At five in the morning or ten at night, it doesn't matter. He is unsure of what she does with herself when he is not there. But again, he fails to ask.

She has ointments and alcohols and silk threads for stitches. She fixes him as he sits in her kitchen on a black folding chair. It is always this chair. It is always this kitchen. The apartment changes very little, if at all. She seems to like it this way. She hums sweetly while she tends to his wounds.

He waits for her lips to touch his skin. Her kisses are an inevitability, one he quickly learned to anticipate. He did not ask for them. He does not allow himself to enjoy them. Still she puts her lips on the nape of his neck, on his shoulder, on the back of his hand.

Once, she held him.

When her work is completed, she boils water for tea. They stare in silence. He has nothing he can say. Sometimes she looks sad but remains quiet. Other times, she sits on the linoleum and lays her head on his knee. He does not acknowledge this.

Her affection is a thing he cannot understand nor reciprocate.

They drink tea together and then he starts to leave. He has never thanked her for what she does. He wonders if he should, though she seems content in their arrangement either way. Next time, he tells himself, as he always tells himself.

She curls a scarf around his neck, one she knit just for him. Every time she has made a new one, and every time that he returns he is without it. They are easy to lose in the depths of the city, though he is glad to have them for as long as he can.

His mother used to knit.

She pulls him back before he slips out the door. She reaches him on her toes and kisses his face. "Don't forget about me," she says. He knows the line well.

A week may pass, or two months, or over half a year. He never forgets where she is. She has slowly become his constant, his safe harbor. She knows every inch of him. He guesses she planned it this way, though her motivations are still a mystery even after all this time.

Even so, there are some nights that chill him to his core, when he tightens the scarf around his throat as he rests in the doorway of some long-vacated building.

And he thinks of her, and of why he has not yet killed her.