He wasn't looking for them.
That was the thing; he hadn't been looking for them, hadn't been thinking about them, had just been passing through the kitchen on his way to somewhere else entirely when his eyes went to the cabinet above the glasses the way they sometimes did, automatic, the way your eyes went to a thing that belonged in a place, and the place was wrong.
He stopped.
Opened the cabinet.
The bottle wasn't there.
He stood in front of the open cabinet for a moment. Looked at the shelf; the glasses, the small bowl where he put spare change, the space where the bottle had been sitting since he'd moved in two years ago, always in the same spot, always next to the glasses because he'd figured out early that the only way to remember something every day was to put it next to something else he did every day.
He closed the cabinet.
Opened it again.
Still not there.
He checked the counter. The drawer below. The shelf on the other side. He did this methodically, without urgency, the way you looked for keys before deciding they were actually gone. He moved through the kitchen and checked the places it could have ended up if he'd set it down somewhere different without thinking.
It hadn't ended up anywhere. It was gone.
He went to his room. Checked the nightstand, the desk, the top of the dresser. He checked the bathroom cabinet, the shelf by the sink, the small bag he took to training. He checked methodically and found nothing and came back to the kitchen and opened the cabinet one more time and looked at the empty space next to the glasses.
He put his jacket on.
Raul was on the couch with his phone when he came through the living room. Looked up.
Raul looked at him for a half second — the particular look of someone who had known him long enough to hear what wasn't being said — and then looked back at his phone.
He was already at the door.
The pharmacy was twelve minutes on foot. He knew because he'd walked it enough times to know, the route automatic; left out of the building, past the dry cleaner, past the place that sold coffee he'd never tried, right at the light, another block and a half.
He walked it faster than usual.
The pharmacist was a man he'd seen before, middle-aged, the kind of face that stayed the same regardless of what was in front of it. He gave him the name of the medication. The dosage.
The pharmacist went to check.
He came back.
20 days.
He stood at the counter and looked at the pharmacist and felt the thing that had been low-register in the kitchen climb several floors.
The pharmacist typed. Looked at the screen. Typed again.
He walked out.
He stood on the pavement outside the pharmacy in the cold and looked at the street and did not move for a moment.
He put his hands in his jacket pockets.
He stood there a moment longer.
Then he started walking home.