Chapter 3 An Unwelcome Introduction
An Unwelcome Introduction
Catherine
Catherine took in the woman standing in her doorway. Messy hair, weight shifting from one foot to the other, irritation written plainly across a flushed face.
Well, Catherine thought. Good.
She was irritated, too. Just when she'd finally broken through months of silence and coaxed music from her fingertips again, this stranger had appeared on her threshold like some cosmic interruption.
Why couldn’t the universe allow her this one small breakthrough—no, revelation? Epiphany? It didn’t matter; she would have to catalog the exact nature of it later; right now, she needed to address the scowling figure standing two feet away and practically vibrating with annoyance.
Their doorman, Frank, wouldn't have buzzed anyone up without calling first, so whoever this was had to live here. Catherine ran through the other three apartments on her floor. She'd made a point of asking Frank about them during those awkward elevator rides when she couldn't avoid small talk.
The man in 14A, Luis Ortiz, had made his fortune in contracting before forty, then promptly developed a passion for experimental cooking that left the hallway smelling of cinnamon and sounding like smoke alarms. His doorstep was perpetually lined with parcels from specialty spice shops, and whenever something broke in the building, he'd appear with tools before anyone could call maintenance, staying to tell rambling stories about his grandmother's village in Spain that no one had the heart to cut short.
Mary Stevenson occupied 14B. She'd moved in during the first Reagan term and still carried herself with the posture of someone who'd spent decades commanding classrooms, though Catherine had once glimpsed her feeding pigeons on the fire escape, cooing to them in a voice so tender it seemed to belong to another person entirely.
Even Frank lowered his voice when she passed through the lobby, but Catherine had noticed how his eyes crinkled when Mary slipped him homemade cookies wrapped in wax paper every Friday.
And 14C was only ever referred to as Dr. Brennan, a medical resident Frank spoke highly of.
“Promising young doctor on the rise”, he’d said. Catherine had pictured someone polished, ambitious, perhaps even respectable, someone who probably ironed their scrubs and spent their rare days off teaching CPR to school children.
Instead, the woman in front of her looked as though she’d been mugged by a particularly enterprising family of raccoons.
Flannel pajama pants, a threadbare T-shirt with visible armpit carnage, and glasses thick enough to qualify as PPE, all half-swallowed by a tangle of copper hair that had clearly staged a coup hours ago.
And barefoot. On the communal carpet. Now that was unforgivable.
The woman adjusted her stance, eyes narrowing under Catherine’s scrutiny. She cleared her throat.
"I'm Theo Brennan. From next door." She gestured vaguely toward 14C with her chin, then pushed her sliding glasses back up with her middle finger. The gesture wasn't quite flipping Catherine off, but it wasn't entirely not doing that either.
Catherine's mouth curved into something adjacent to a smile… If you squinted. “Theo? Is that short for—”
“Theodora," the woman said, crossing her arms. “But no one calls me that. I go by Theo.”
“Understood. Was there something you needed?”
"Well, yeah—" Theodora gestured vaguely between them.
"Catherine."
"Right. Catherine.” Theodora rubbed at her eye under her glasses. “Listen, playing piano at two in the morning is insane. You need to stop."
Catherine wanted to scoff. The last time someone had spoken to her with such casual authority was a conductor who'd tried (and failed) correcting her (already correct) tempo during her first year at Juilliard. She kept her face blank, but mentally called strike one for her neighbor.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea it was so late,” Catherine replied, her voice a practiced blend of surprise and apology that had smoothed countless awkward moments with colleagues over the years.
It was a familiar reflex, if also untrue.
She had known exactly what time it was. She’d watched the clock hands crawl past midnight, past one, while her mind refused to quiet. The piano waited in the corner of her second bedroom, now repurposed as a music room, silent and accusing.
And tonight, after her meeting with Simon earlier in the day, she’d run out of excuses not to play. That sharp, familiar voice in her head, the one that always sounded a little too much like her mother, had simply said, That’s enough, Catherine. It’s been a year. Pull yourself together.
“Really?”
Catherine’s attention snapped back to the doorway. “Yes. I don’t usually watch the clock when I play. I must have lost track of time.”
A flicker of disbelief passed across the younger woman’s face, sharp and irritatingly perceptive.
Those green eyes behind those unfortunate glasses caught the dim hallway light and held Catherine’s own, steady and unblinking, as if challenging her to admit the lie.
And for a ridiculous moment, Catherine actually felt the impulse to justify herself, which was completely absurd.
She didn’t explain herself to anyone, least of all a woman whose hair and judgment were apparently engaged in the same losing battle.
“You should. Look at a clock, I mean. The walls between our apartments aren’t as thick as you clearly think they are.”
Catherine’s response came in a quiet so controlled that it bordered on elegant disdain. “Sorry, you’ll have to refresh my memory. I don’t recall seeing any noise restrictions in the building bylaws. Where can I find them?”
"Well, there aren't any on paper. Just like there's no written rule against setting your neighbor's apartment on fire, but most people grasp the concept without legal guidance." She tilted her head, voice composed but scathing. “But I guess you’re not most people.”
And that was strike two.
Catherine smiled with the precise warmth of an ice cube as she said, "How fascinating that our building comes with its own etiquette enforcers. I must have missed that amenity in the brochure."
“Enforcer? No. But I am a doctor who’s due in the ER in a few hours, and I’d rather not kill anyone because you felt like practicing scales at stupid o’clock.”
"And yet here you are, wasting your precious sleep time conducting door-to-door confrontations."
"This isn't a confrontation. This is one neighbor making a reasonable request to another."
“Reasonable.” Catherine tasted the word and found it wanting. "No, Dr. Brennan. A reasonable request would come with civility, perhaps even a ‘please.’ You opened with righteous indignation and insinuations. But I suppose it’s quite the introduction, if nothing else.”
The silence that followed gave Catherine time to study her properly. The calm conviction. The moral glow.
"My work," Catherine said, "doesn't operate on hospital schedules. It doesn't respect shift changes or rotations, or your personal requirements for unconsciousness. Just as you are required to work unsociable hours, so am I. And when inspiration comes, I play."
"Inspiration?" Theodora echoed. "At two in the morning? That's not inspiration, that’s a noise violation."
"That's Frédéric Chopin. Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. posth., if you're interested in the specifics."
“Yeah? Well, you’re not channeling him very well. I doubt he made a habit of terrorizing his neighbors,” Theodora said, too tired to blunt the edge.
Terrorizing? She thought Catherine’s playing was terrorizing?
And that made three strikes for the good doctor.
Catherine stepped just past the threshold, close enough that she had to look down at Theodora. “Forgive me,” she said calmly. “I assumed someone entrusted with human lives wouldn’t unravel over a simple nocturne.”
For a beat, Theodora just stared up at her, caught somewhere between disbelief and fury. Catherine watched her and saw the exact moment she realized that no amount of exhaustion or anger was going to move this conversation in favor of her very “reasonable” request.
“Still,” Catherine continued, her voice dropping fractionally, “I do admire your commitment to suffering. Turning a little sleepiness into a moral crusade takes real imagination.”
The color that flooded Theodora’s cheeks was visible even in the hallway's diffused lighting, and Catherine felt a flutter of something that might have been triumph.
A door creaked open down the hall, cutting Theodora off mid-breath.
Catherine glanced over to see 14B's door swing wide, revealing a woman in her seventies with a face that had earned every one of its lines.
She wore a faded pink robe cinched tight at the waist, her gray hair mostly contained under a silk bonnet except for the wisps that had escaped during sleep.
One hand gripped a wooden cane while the other settled on her hip as she took in the hallway standoff with narrowed eyes.
“For the love of God,” she muttered, loud enough to be heard. "It's two in the morning."
"Mary—" Theodora began, but the older woman cut her off with a raised hand.
"Theo, sweetheart, I'm trying to sleep. And you know I love you, but those bags under your eyes are getting so big they're gonna need their own mailbox soon." She tapped her cane once on the carpet. "You need some rest."
Catherine watched Theodora’s face cycle through surprise, indignation, and reluctant amusement in rapid succession.
“Thanks, Mary. I was trying to sleep. But I took a break to explain to our new neighbor that two a.m. piano concerts aren’t exactly neighborly.”
Mary snorted, leaning on her cane. "Neighborly? Theo, you're out here in those ratty pajamas with your left boob near enough waving hello through that hole. You might want to save the etiquette lessons for daylight hours."
"Whose side are you on?" Theodora huffed, tugging at the worn fabric over her chest.