PART 3:

He watched her unlock her door. She glanced back once before she went in. Not a look he could read exactly, just a look, just a you’re still there confirmation. And then the door closed and he was standing in his own doorway listening to the quiet click of her lock turning. He went back to the kitchen.

The two mugs were still on the coffee table. He carried them to the sink and stood there washing them, both hands in warm water, looking out the dark window above the sink. She knocked, he thought. She stood in the hallway in a party dress at 11:40 at night and knocked on my door because she didn’t want to be alone. He turned off the kitchen light.

He thought about the way she’d lined those hairpins up on the edge of his coffee table. Neat little row. Even when she was falling apart, she was organizing something. He thought about I like when things balance. He stood in the dark for a minute longer than he needed to. Then he went to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling and the apartment still felt empty. But different now.

Not the kind of empty that presses inward, the kind that’s waiting for something. He didn’t know what to do with that. He fell asleep eventually and he dreamed about nothing he could remember and at 6:15 a.m. his alarm went off and he got up and made coffee and went to work. And the next Thursday he noticed her light was on across the hall when he got home at 7:00.

And he stood at his own door with his keys in his hand for a full 10 seconds before he went inside. He told himself he didn’t know why. That was the second lie. He had let her in because it was the human thing to do. He kept thinking about her because something in him recognized something in her. And that that recognition was the thing that was going to change everything.

He just didn’t know it yet. Thursday came around the way Thursdays always did. Quiet, unremarkable. The kind of day that didn’t announce itself. Ethan got home at 6:58 p.m. Boots still dusty from a crawl space job in Riverside, and he was halfway through unlocking his door when he heard it. Music.

Low, muffled through the wall across the hallway. Not loud enough to complain about. Just loud enough to notice. He noticed. He went inside. He didn’t knock on her door. He had no reason to knock on her door. What had happened Tuesday night was a one-time thing. A woman had a bad evening, a neighbor opened his door, two people drank tea until 1:30 in the morning, and that was the whole story.

There was no chapter two. He wasn’t writing chapter two. He made himself a sandwich and ate it standing at the counter, and the music across the hall played on low, and he thought about nothing in particular. At 7:22, his phone buzzed. Marcus, you working Saturday? He texted back. Morning. Free by noon. Good. Bring your head.

We need to talk about something. Ethan set the phone down. Marcus Hale had been his best friend since they were 19, working the same summer crew laying ductwork in a half-built office park outside Columbus. He was the kind of man who said we need to talk and meant it, who didn’t use words to fill space, who had been divorced once and come out the other side of it with a quality Ethan privately thought of as earned wisdom.

The kind you only get from being genuinely wrong about something that mattered. He didn’t reply to the last text. He finished his sandwich. He went to bed earlier than usual. He did not think about Olivia Heart. He thought about Olivia Heart exactly three times before he fell asleep. The first time was when he turned off the light and heard the faint sound of her television through the shared wall.

She’d switched from music to something else, some late-night program with a studio audience. The second time was when he was almost under, and suddenly remembered the way she’d lined up those hairpins on his coffee table. The third time was somewhere between awake and not, when he thought he heard her laugh, real, unguarded, probably at whatever was on television.

And the sound of it moved through the wall and settled somewhere in the room, and he didn’t try to analyze it. He was too tired. He just let it be there. The knock came on Sunday. Not late this time. 4:17 in the afternoon, Sophie’s side of the week, which meant the apartment smelled like macaroni and cheese and finger paint.

And Sophie’s sneakers were in the middle of the floor because she’d taken them off in the exact wrong place and hadn’t been persuaded to move them yet. Ethan opened the door, and Olivia was standing there with a ceramic dish covered in foil. “I made too much casserole,” she said. He looked at her. She was in jeans and a plain shirt, hair up, glasses on.

He’d never seen her in glasses before, frameless rectangles that made her look simultaneously more serious and more human. She held the casserole dish out toward him like a peace offering, or maybe like evidence. “You made casserole,” he said. “I make it when I’m stress cooking. I do that sometimes. It makes a lot.

” “What are you stressed about? She opened her mouth, closed it. Do you want the casserole or not? I want the casserole, he said, and stepped back. She came in, same as before, but different. Easier this time. Less like someone stealing herself and more like someone who decided something. She set the dish on the counter.

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