Midnight Notes and Moondust

ACT I — The Setup The night the club changed its name to the Blue Lantern, I was nursing a glass of bourbon and a story that had stalled at chapter five. The neon outside hummed the way cicadas do in July—persistent, little insects of light—and the rain had drawn tiny trails down the window like hurried signatures. I liked that the rain made the jazz cleaner somehow, as if it washed the edges of reality soft and ready for something unexpected. I am not what people expect when they look at me. From the outside, I am Evelyn Hargrave: forty, divorced, a Southern-bred novelist who believes in the slow burn of love and the stubborn insistence of second chances. I wear my hair in waves like riverwater, and I keep poems folded into the lining of my coat. I came to the Blue Lantern because the club’s hands smelled of coffee and smoke and history; because the bartender remembers my name when most places only remember my credit card; because, selfishly, it was an easier place to be alone inside a roomful of strangers. He was there the first night I noticed the difference. Seated at the far end of the bar, where the light pooled like spilled honey, he looked like someone who stepped out of an old photograph and into a new life. He was not handsome in the way men are described on glossy pages—he had a jaw with a small scar that arrested the light, hands that looked both callused and precise, and eyes the color of old coins. He wore a coat of a color I couldn't quite name, something like stormwater and midnight mixed, and when he smiled it was an economy of movement that suggested mischief rather than leisure. The saxophonist that night played like someone mourning and celebrating at once. The music was a dialogue between the brass and the smoke, notes bending into one another like lovers testing the rules. I tell stories for a living, and sometimes that means I can feel the narrative in a room—how people shift, the rhythm of their conversations, where a pause will become a promise. That night, the air between the man and me threaded with something not yet named. He introduced himself with a tilt of his glass and a line I could have sworn I'd read in a book I once loved: "Do you come here often because of the music or because of the moon?" I laughed because it was outrageous and because it fit the poem I kept in my coat about the moon being a meddlesome aunt. "I come for both. And for the bartender, who refuses to let me drink anything less than respectable." "That's a good bartender," he said. "Telephone number?" He offered his hand in that careful, cultured manner—as if he was allowing me to choose whether I wanted to be included in his small, secret world. I told him my name, and he told me his. He said it in a way that made every syllable sound like it had been thought out in advance, which made me suspicious. People with practiced names are usually hiding either an occupation or an origin story they do not wish to tell. He called himself Rowan Ellery, and the name seemed to cling to him like a scent. There was a magic to the Blue Lantern that the city’s nightlife guide never captured. The light itself—soft blue bulbs hung like lanterns in fishing nets—seemed to smooth edges, to encourage confessions. The bathrooms were perfumed with something something poured from a small jar labeled "moonwater" in handwriting my grandmother might have used for love letters. I remember thinking, privately and with a novelist's attention to detail, that the room felt like a stage set for a memory I had not yet made. Rowan talked about his work in half-phrases. He was an antiquarian, he said, though that sounded too small for him. He part-managed, he suggested; he dealt with things that had a life beyond their makers. "Books, mostly," he said, but his voice tilted, and I caught the hint of something older—charms, trinkets, a certain brass key he toyed with at the rim of his glass. I told him I was a writer, and he smiled then in a different way, the kind of smile readers call "knowing." "So you see the world for stories," he said. "And you see the world for relics?" I asked. "I see the world for what people leave behind." He lifted the key briefly, letting the light catch in its grooves. "Sometimes what they leave is a hole. Sometimes it's a map. Sometimes it's—" He did not finish the sentence, which was a strategic move I appreciated. It left me to fill the air with my own imagination, which in turn made me more complicit in whatever game he was proposing. We traded stories between songs, a cadence of wit and disarming honesty. I told him about the book that stalled, about divorce papers kept in a drawer with the kind of meticulous mourning that had become its own ritual. He disclosed something quieter: a childhood kept between two houses, summers in foreign ports, an aunt who taught him how to find the edges of pieces that didn't belong. He touched the scar on his jaw with a thumb like someone dusting an old photograph. When I left that night, the rain had stopped. The moon was a thin coin overhead. Rowan walked me to the curb and didn't kiss me, which was itself a flirtation. Instead he bent his head and whispered, "Come back Thursday. The night is different when the horns remember to listen." There was a promise in that sentence and a dare. I went back. ACT II — Rising Tension The Blue Lantern tastes different on Thursdays. It's not just a schedule; it's a small magic. The crowd shifts—more people with the kind of attention that can linger on a lyric—and the saxophonist slides into ballads that loosen tongues like wine. Rowan was there again, like a note recurring between the lines of a poem. That night, the band played like they were inventing the world anew: the drums tapped out a language, the bass hummed like something breathing beneath water, and the saxophone sang of regret and triumph in equal measure. We picked up where we'd left off. Conversation feels more intimate when you have a shared secret, even if that secret is nothing more than the knowledge that two people like the same song. But there is an intimacy that is subtler than handholding; it is the way you let someone see what you are most careful to hide. I told him about the paragraph that would not finish, the one about two people in the dark who admit that they are, in fact, very hungry for one another. He told me a story about a book he'd once obtained that had blank pages in the middle and a single line handwritten in the back: "This is where you begin again." "What does it mean?" I asked. "That depends on whether you are brave enough to answer the page." He answered in that soft voice, inches away, the space between us charged like a violin string. "Tell me, Evelyn: do you finish things?" The question lodged in me like a pebble in a shoe. I answered with my chin up. "Not always. Sometimes I gather pieces of things and hope they fit." It was both true and an invitation. He smiled indulgently. "So you are a collector of fragments. I prefer restorers. They have patience." It was the sort of banter that felt like flirtation by proxy—witty, teasing, but protective of the distance that made it delicious. Over the next weeks, Rowan became the punctuation in my evenings. He appeared at a corner table as if summoned by music and moonlight, sometimes bringing an oddity—a feather preserved in amber, a pocket watch with a tiny inscription in a language I didn't know. Once he produced a small box that smelled faintly of orange peel and old paper. Inside it was a single, silver throat bead shaped like a crescent moon. "For you," he said. "To anchor your voice." I pressed it to my palm, and for a moment I could feel the thrum of his pulse through the cool metal. Our cat-and-mouse evolved. He would offer a glance that held invitations and half-answers; I would deflect with a joke or a look that said, 'try harder.' The club became our playground, and the jazz, our accomplice. We interrupted each other in ways that were intimate—an elbow on a napkin, a shared cigarette in the alley that tasted like pepper and possibility. We were careful, too; both of us had histories heavy enough to be dangerous when mishandled. Rowan was a study in restraint. It amused me to watch him manage his appetites with the same precision he used to run his fingers over leather bindings. But even restraint, when worn long enough, develops cracks. One night, after the band played a set that made every heartbeat in the room audible, he leaned in, and his voice was low as a confession. "Do you ever think about the rules we keep ourselves to?" he asked. "All the time," I said. "My mother taught me three rules growing up: never accept candy from strangers, never sleep on regrets, and always keep your hand warm by someone you love." He hummed. "I had two: keep your promises and do not feed the creatures that sleep in attics." "Creatures in attics?" I laughed, picturing tiny, dusty beasts in bow ties. "Metaphorical ones, mostly." He reached for my hand across the table, and there was a tremor there as if he were feeling out for something he wanted to be sure existed. "But sometimes the attic creatures are very real." The hand he held was warm and smelled faintly of smoke and citrus. There was something about his touch that made the world thin at its edges; the hum of the bass, the clink of ice in a neighboring glass, all of them receded. It was a private concert, and the music was just for us. We shared a moment of silence that felt like the necessary inhalation before a long word. Then the lights above the stage dimmed to the blue of the lanterns and the saxophone began a slow, honeyed riff that curled around us. Rowan's fingers tightened a fraction. "Come with me upstairs," he said. Upstairs at the Blue Lantern was not part of the club's public face. There was a narrow staircase that led to a room with velvet curtains and a balcony that overlooked the street, and it was rumored to be where performers sometimes took their guests when they needed a private set. The room smelled of cedar and rain. A small lamp cast a pool of light over a chaise that seemed to have been waiting for centuries for someone to finally sit on it. Rowan closed the door behind us, and for a moment the city dissolved into the sound of our breaths. He lit a lamp with a match that flared like a tiny sun. The flame made dust particles dance between us like moths. "Do you believe in charms?" he asked. I thought of the throat bead in my pocket. I thought of the pocket watch with the unknown inscription. The wise, false answer would have been no. The honest one was yes. "Yes," I said. "Do you?" He smiled as if reassured. "I believe in small things that change the state of a person. I believe in objects that hold a memory and in people who remember how to make the ordinary dangerous." He reached for me then with both hands—not the preliminary touches of courtship, but a claim. He lifted my chin and kissed me. His mouth tasted like the last sip of bourbon and the promise of rain. We fit together like sentences written to be one another's end. The kiss was at once gentle and urgent; he moved with a deliberateness that said he'd rehearsed restraint until it became an art form. I answered with the kind of abandon I keep hidden for my pages: I pressed my palm to his chest, feeling the steady thud of a heart that had contained tempered storms. But we still did not cross the threshold. The kiss became a geography, a map. He drew back and said, with that maddeningly composed knowledge, "Not yet." I had to laugh then, the sound surprising in the small room. "You're an expert at leaving the door cracked just so everyone stumbles on the hinge." "It's keeping us honest." He took my hand again and placed something else in it: a small, folded scrap of paper. "When the music changes its mind, meet me here at dawn. Bring nothing but the truth." I was a novelist; I lived by truth and its soft, pliable edges. I went home that night with the scrap of paper in my pocket and a head full of sentences. For a week I agonized in a way writers recognize: I crafted conversations in my head, I tried to anticipate the meaning of 'when the music changes its mind.' I thought of the throat bead, the attic creatures, of promises that one day became burdens. The city felt poised between the cold and something warmer. At the Blue Lantern, Rowan continued to be present in the seams of my nights, never quite occupying them completely. We danced around confessions like sparring partners—witty, skilled—and the banter sharpened our edges. Sometimes he teased me with the kind of tender cruelty that makes one feel desirable and protected in the same breath. Once he said to me, smiling with an expression that made my stomach drop, "I am a man who catalogues things. If it were up to me, I would list every way you smile. But then I would have nothing left to find." The obstacles to surrender piled up like the pages of an unfinished novel. I worried about my own broken promises to myself, about the practicalities of diving into something that could burn. I also, secretly and with a heat that surprised me, feared how much I wanted him. One night, the band paused mid-set because a woman in the audience stood up and declared—very loudly and with the authority of a woman who had swallowed too much courage—that the Blue Lantern was a place of truth and that secrets were owed a tax. There was a moment of mutual embarrassment that turned quickly into laughter, and then the music warmed back up as if nothing had happened. Rowan took the chance—while everyone was distracted—to press his mouth to my ear and say, "Meet me. Midnight tomorrow. The roof. No lies." I went. The roof of the Blue Lantern was a city in miniature: humming air conditioning units, the distant glow of late-night diners, a smear of stars brave enough to peek through the cloud. The jazz below made the bricks vibrate, and the moon hung like a witness. Rowan was already there, leaning against the low wall that overlooked the street. He held a flask of something dark and fragrant. We shared it. The whiskey was hot and honest, and the air was sharp with salt and asphalt and the smell of my own perfume, which always reads to me like childhood. We talked then in a cadence that had been building for weeks—bits of confessions slipping into jokes, truths disguised as metaphors. He took my hand and stroked the back of it with his thumb. "There's a thing I need to tell you," he said. His voice had a tremor like a chord stretched too tightly. "I don't belong entirely to what you know." I toyed with that like I toyed with a title in a draft. "You mean you have a job that involves more antique markets at dawn?" He shook his head and let out a laugh that was half rueful. "No. I mean something older. My family—my bloodline—has a way of seeing things that other people do not. We are... custodians of certain boundaries. It's a silly sounding job title, but it is true: we keep watch where stories leak into the wrong places." I wanted to make a joke about bedtime for the world, but his eyes were grave enough to stop me. "Are you asking me to believe you? Or to indulge you?" He looked at me like someone laying out a map for a traveler. "Both. I could not ask for blind devotion. But I do ask for your curiosity. The world has a seam near here. The music sometimes frays the edge. I watch for that." Hudson's poet-in-residence side of me wanted to scoff, but another part—the part that had read fairy tales to keep the night smaller—leaned forward. "What seam?" I asked. He pointed. Down the street, a storefront with a display of cracked porcelain glowed like a stage. "There are places where memory and longing overlap. A man with too many regrets can leave a doorway open when he moves. A song can catch its breath and tuck a piece of itself into a passerby. I mend those places. Often it's nothing more consequential than a lost heirloom returning to its chest. Sometimes it's more dangerous—when a grief reaches out and wants to be kept forever." The city below us sighed and unfurled. I thought of the woman who interrupted the band—how desire and performance sometimes braided. I thought of my own reasons for staying a safe distance from repair: fear that once touched, you might have to be responsible for the other person's unhealed parts. Rowan's voice softened. "I came close to losing for a long time, Evelyn. I was very good at being alone. Then I met people who taught me a new kind of keeping. You are the kind of person who notices the small threads. You would be good at helping me." He said it with an earnestness that made my throat tighten. The words were an invitation and a request and an incantation. I considered my own rules. I had kept my hand warm by someone I loved, and not all of them turned out to be worthy of warmth. I had kept promises and broken others. But the novelist in me was greedy for truth—especially the truths that complicated the neat order of life. "All right," I said. "I will help you. But not because I believe your story. Because I want to." He smiled then in a way that made the moon seem redundant. "That's an honest answer. I like that better than belief." Once we committed, things shifted. Rowan taught me small ways of noticing—how to listen to the spaces between notes, how to smell at the edge of a memory for residue, how to read the way an old thing trembled when it wanted to be whole again. We prowled the city like gentle burglars. There were times we found keys and returned them; times we found letters and placed them back inside the hands that had lost them. Each success knit us closer, and with each shared triumph, our conversations lost the armor of irony and revealed softer skin beneath. The tension in our evenings was no longer only whether we would cross into one another's beds; it was the slow confluence of risk and delight. Our touch lingered longer, our jokes dipped into tenderness, and we began to trade not only witty repartee but small revelations—the ways we forgave ourselves, the things we still wanted, the dreams we kept folded like maps in our pockets. There were near-misses, too. Once, mid-repair, an old woman with a sharp tongue and eyes like a hawk interrupted us, scolding me for leaning too close to a display of music boxes. We stumbled backwards into the alley, and the electricity between us crackled into embarrassed laughter. Another night, a man who once loved Rowan appeared in the doorway of a bookstore and the air thickened with history, like the smell of old paper left too long in the sun. We fended off those intrusions with charm and practical magic—Rowan's coin tricks, my propensity for a well-placed question. Those interruptions delayed us and made our eventual surrender richer. In private moments, Rowan let his composure slip. He confessed to me a childhood secret: rolling in the grass under a sky full of migrating birds, convincing himself the world contained other breeds of humans who spoke in music. He told me he had loved and lost someone who sang lullabies to broken things. My replies were not always comforting; sometimes they were bare, pragmatic truths. But we learned to grow brave in each other's company. One evening, as autumn crept into the city and the Blue Lantern traded its humid nights for cooler, decisive air, our closeness felt inevitable. The band performed a slow, intimate set that made the room thin and raw. I touched the throat bead in my pocket—an anchor, still cool against my skin. Rowan's fingers found mine under the table and didn't wish to let go. His thumb traced the line of my wrist like a cartographer. "I've been holding back for fear of wearing you out," he admitted, voice low. "And I've been holding back because I'm afraid of the thing that happens after we give in." "What is that?" I asked. He shrugged the kind of shrug that suggested more than it said. "Loss, perhaps. Or that the magic—if it exists in the way I think—will notice and take an interest. Some enchantments like witnesses, and some like offerings." He looked at me then with an intensity that made cups on the shelf seem to lean toward us. I had always liked danger that came with a promise. "Let it take notice," I said. "Most of my favorite stories begin with someone being noticed." He grinned, mischief restoring him. "So you are an accomplice to discovery?" "Yes. And a co-conspirator to mischief." He lifted his glass. "Then we are dangerously well suited." ACT III — The Climax & Resolution The night it finally happened felt like the first honest sentence of a book. It was late; the club was a small pool of breathing bodies and softlight, the kind of night when the saxophonist played like the world might end gracefully. Rowan took me by the hand and led me—not to the upstairs or the roof, but through a door near the kitchen I had not seen before. It opened onto a narrow corridor lined with old photographs and feathered fans. The air shifted; it smelled like star anise and the piano keys of midnight. At the end of the corridor was a small room with windows that looked out over the alley. A single lamp burned on a table beside a narrow bed covered in a quilt of deep blues and greens. The room felt as if it had been waiting for us to remember it. Rowan closed the door behind us and pulled me into his arms. We kissed like people who had rehearsed in fragments for months and were at last reading the whole scene. His hands were patient and roaming; mine were eager and earnest. He undid the buttons of my blouse with a surgeon's tenderness, each motion a litany of compliments. My breath came in short, deliberate draws, exhaling into the hollow of his neck. I felt the skin there, warm and slightly bristled, and the scent of him—smoke, cedar, and something flowerlike—sank into me. We moved like the tide: slow, gathering, and impossible to hold back. Rowan's fingers traced the line of my spine with an attention that was its own blessing. He kissed the hollow of my throat, then the place where collarbone meets skin. I tugged his shirt over his head; he let out a soft sound that was astonishment and invitation. His torso was a map—scars, muscles, the tiny constellation of freckles at his left shoulder that I would commit to memory. We undressed in a choreography that was intimate and familiar; clothing pooled like spent vows. It was absurd how nakedness illuminates the private architecture of a person—the slope of hip to waist, the place where breath catches, the tiny incisions of history. I took him in: his chest rising, the quick hitch of his breath when my tongue traced the edge of his collarbone. And when he pressed his mouth to my chest, his lips warm and exact, the sound I made was not simply pleasure but recognition. Rowan was a slow lover, and his patience was a kindness. He worshipped the small things—the inside of my knee, the soft place behind my ear, the place where my fingers curled when I wanted to hold on. He moved with the deliberation of a conservator restoring a fragile painting, as if he were afraid to damage whatever wonder he had found. His mouth traveled in a map I hadn't known I kept, and with each stop he left the stamp of a vow. I, in return, was not reserved. I responded to him the way a fire responds to dry wood: immediate, bright, demanding. I wanted to show him how I could be both compass and conflagration. My hands found the lines of his back, memorizing the angles and indentations that made him uniquely Rowan. I kissed him with a fierce pleasure that made his breath hitch and his hands tighten in my hair. When we became one, it was like sliding into a sentence that had been waiting to be completed. The first thrust was slow and deep, a settling into the exact contour where we fit. The room was small, and the quilt whispered against the bedspread. Rowan's breath was close to mine, hot in the soft places behind my ear. The city hummed somewhere below like a chorus. We moved together with a tempo that alternated between urgent and tender. There were moments when I felt as if the world had gone silent, all attention concentrated on the meeting of skin and muscle, on the way our bodies remembered how to compose together. Other times the motion was a conversation—his gentle coaxing, my urgent replies, our laughter when words bungled the delicate work we were doing. He murmured my name like a secret I had always wanted. "Evelyn," he said, and the sound of it inside him was a benediction. We spent an hour in a kind of holy improvisation—hands and mouths and breath learning each other's lexicon. There were small erotic ceremonies: the way he kissed the inside of my thigh and made my toes curl; the way I wrapped my legs around him and felt the tremor that preceded a fall. At one point I leaned back and watched him, the lamplight flaring in the planes of his face. He was lit from within by exertion and something happier—adoration. I felt seen in a way that pried my ribs open gently, like a surgeon with reverence rather than a butcher. When I came, it was a slow bloom, a flood that started behind the eyes and spread to the fingers and toes. Rowan groaned—a low, reverent sound—and followed not long after, clutching my hips like a sailor holding to the mast. We lay tangled together, the quilt a map of our crossing. We did not sleep right away. We talked in the kind of whispers reserved for afters—confidences salted with promises, laughter like small bells. "You are a very dangerous woman," he said at one point, tracing a lazy circle on my breast. "You give me too much credit." I kissed him, tasting the salt of his skin and something sweet, like caramel left on the tongue. "You're the one who lit a match beside the gasoline." He frowned playfully. "I prefer to think of myself as the keeper of small fires." Outside, the city changed. Dawn was a faint bruise on the horizon. The sound of the saxophonist below grew thin and tentative, as if the night didn't want to let go. Rowan's hands were steady against me. He turned his head and kissed the tip of my nose once, hard enough to make me giggle. "There are consequences to what we've done tonight," he said. "Not in the moral sense—that's a novelist's territory—but in the practical sense. Magic notices when it's touched. Sometimes it leaves a calling card." I sat up enough to look at him properly. "And does it like us? Does it approve?" He smiled a little, a gallery of private things. "It is amused. That, to me, is a good first step." He rolled onto his back and wrapped an arm behind my head like he had a whole lifetime of gestures planned. For a long while we simply watched the way the ceiling took on the slow blue of morning. The city softened into pale gold. When we left the Blue Lantern that morning, we didn't rush; we carried our small domesticity out into the street like contraband. Rowan kissed my wrist before we parted and slid something into my palm. It was a tiny key, fluted and bright. "For the attic," he said. "For the things we'll find." I looked at him, heart swelling with the heady, dangerous thing that had begun in earnest between us. "Are you certain you want an accomplice?" I asked. "I'm certain I want you," he said simply. We walked away together as if we had always done so. The city smelled like paper and hope; the jazz club receded into the hum of a weekend about to awaken. The novel in my head finally moved again, an eager river finding its channel. Afterwards—after the nights of discovery, after the small repairs and returned things—the thing that mattered most was not the magic we tended or the objects we mended. It was the way Rowan learned to ask me about my work with the earnestness of a man who could not get enough of the ordinary miracles I made, and the way I learned to trace his scars without asking for their stories. We became each other's small harbor: a place where the music made less sense and more honesty lived. There were consequences, of course. A week later, a woman who had lost a locket found her way to the club and wept when we returned it. Another time, a child stumbled into our path carrying a melody that didn't belong to him; the correction took the better part of an evening and left us exhausted in a way that felt deliciously earned. Sometimes magic did leave calling cards—an echo of laughter in an empty room, a sudden crop of blue flowers growing out of a sidewalk crack. We took them as reminders that the world had more possibilities than practical people allowed. Months went by and a pattern settled in: music, repairs, shared cigarettes in alleyways, and nights when we surrendered like two people finally reading from the same page. One evening, as autumn leaned into its thin, truthful light, I found a small piece of paper in Rowan's pocket. On it, in a hand I had memorized, was written: "For when the music forgets—come home." We kept doing what we did. We mended the seams and let the music run its erratic course. We fell into arguments, the small, honest ones—about whether to keep a particular relic or hand it on to another owner; about the right ingredient in a cassoulet; about whether certain chapters in life should be rewritten. We made up quickly because our work demanded we be practical and gentle to one another, and because the bed we had discovered together was a place of great diplomacy. On a night when the lanterns outside the club burned particularly bright, someone asked me if I believed in fate. I looked at Rowan across the room—he was laughing at a joke I had long ago stopped pretending not to find funny—and I thought about all the small choices that had brought me to this moment. I thought of the mouth of a man who kissed like he was putting the world back together, and the way his hands remembered the exact places to soothe. "I believe in the way music finds you when you need it," I said. "And in the way a stranger can become everything you didn't know you were missing." Rowan raised his glass to me then, his eyes soft as old linen. When we touched, the warmth of the liquid spread between us like a secret. The cat-and-mouse had become an easy partnership; the witty banter had deepened into language almost sacred. We still teased and flirted, of course—habit dies hard in lovers—but now there was an undertone of forever in our voices. We never stopped being careful—both of the city and of each other. There were nights when the work tired us until our bones hummed. There were evenings when we sat smoking in the alley and whispered our small, foolish hopes to the empty air. There were also nights when the music took us apart and then brought us back together, like a river folding on itself. The thing I like best, though—the thing that keeps me writing late into the night, that puts a smile on my face as I fold clean laundry and place bookmarks in half-finished novels—is that our life together is not the end of a story but a beginning. Rowan holds my hand now when the band starts a new melody; I watch the way he breathes in the notes and then shares them with me. We are both collectors and restorers, and the city—much like the pages in my novels—contains more seams than any single reader can repair. Once, sometime late, when the rain was a rumor and the moon wore a crescent like a secret smile, Rowan placed his forehead to mine and said, "There are worse things than being noticed by magic." I whispered back into the warmth of his mouth, "There are better things than being afraid of it." The Blue Lantern's neon hummed on, indifferent and beloved. The saxophone somewhere in the corner still played the same song it had the first night I came into the club, and the notes felt like a promise kept. We returned to the work we did—mending what needed mending—and when the city left a calling card on our doorstep, we answered together. And when the music changed its mind, as it always will, we were there to listen—and to love—until the last note fell into place.