Henry, drunk and soaked in a growing storm, realizes he has gone past numbness into something worse. He finds two pills his sister Muriel left him, swallows them without water, and stumbles to his building but cannot make himself climb the steps to his apartment.

He sits on the stoop, staring upward and forcing himself to treat his thoughts like weather he can endure. In the rain, a well-dressed man suddenly appears beside him, lighting a cigarette. Henry initially mistakes him for his brother David, but the resemblance fades as Henry notices a chilling detail: the rain never touches the stranger.

The stranger asks Henry what he wants “right now,” and Henry answers that he wants to be happy. The stranger dismisses that as something no one can give and draws out Henry’s real pain: Henry feels exhausted by expectations and by never being enough, and though Henry can tolerate being alone, the particular ache he carries “hurts.” The stranger gently tilts Henry’s chin up, praises him as “perfect,” and speaks about pain as something that can transform and create.

When Henry admits he wants to be loved, the stranger says it is simple—if Henry is willing to pay. The stranger clarifies the cost is not money but “the one thing every human has to give,” and Henry, thinking of myths and scripture, begins to understand what the offer implies even as he insists he does not believe in devils or souls.

The stranger presses on, promising Henry the kind of love and acceptance Henry craves “by all of them,” in exchange for a price Henry “won’t even miss.” Desperate and doubting the encounter is real, Henry takes the stranger’s hand; the grip reopens the cuts on Henry’s palm, but Henry feels nothing as the stranger seals it with one word: “Deal.”