Chapter 20
RETH
Flashback
The key fits on the first try.
I stand in the open doorway for a moment before I go in. Not caution. Ritual. The last second before crossing a line I’ve been circling for months. I step inside and pull the door shut behind me, closing my eyes as I inhale deep.
Her apartment smells like her. Warm and specific—something floral underneath something sweeter, the unique layering of a woman’s space that no lens has ever been able to give me.
I’ve watched this building for weeks, watched her come and go.
None of it prepared me for this. For the way the scent of her hits the back of my throat like something I was starving for without knowing it.
I don’t move immediately. I just… breathe, letting it fill my lungs.
Hold it there. It’s a unique kind of intimacy, breathing someone’s air in a room they don’t know you’re standing in.
It does something to me. Something that starts in my chest and moves outward, like honey through veins, the way heat moves through cold muscle.
I’ve found myself standing in some of the worst, most fucked-up rooms multiple times in my life.
Rooms that smelled like fear and copper, that staleness of places people don’t come back from.
I’ve stood in them and felt nothing. Filed them.
Moved on. This is a woman’s apartment in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, and it’s the most dangerous room I’ve ever been in.
I take my time, my gaze raking from corner to corner, then decide on the living room first. I move through it slowly, not searching, just absorbing.
Everything in here was chosen by her. Every object has passed through her hands, been decided on, been kept.
That matters. I want to understand the logic of her, the particular grammar of how she arranges her world.
Throw blankets on the couch are in colors that shouldn’t work together—rust and sage and something close to dusty pink—layered and slightly tangled, the way they get when someone actually uses them rather than displays them.
I press my palm flat into the nearest one.
It still holds the faint impression of her, the detail of fabric that’s been slept on, curled into, dragged across cold feet on winter nights.
I leave my hand there longer than necessary.
There’s a book face down on the arm of the couch, spine cracked, pages bent at the corner where she stopped.
I pick it up carefully, read the page she left open.
There’s a sentence underlined in pencil.
“Love is not the butterflies you feel when you’re with someone.
It’s the brokenness you experience when you’re apart.
” She underlined it twice, the second line pressed harder than the first, like she needed to make sure it stayed. The words mattered to her.
I read it three times.
I put it back exactly as I found it. Face down. Same page. Same angle.
Her shoes are by the door in a pile that defies explanation—five pairs, at least, none of them put away, one on its side like it finally gave up.
I crouch down. Straighten the one that’s fallen, then stay there for a moment, looking at the apartment from where her shoes live.
There’s something about the view from here—small and slightly chaotic and entirely warm—that makes my chest do something I don’t examine.
I stand. Move to the coffee table.
Left there from this morning is a mug, lipstick on the rim in the shade of red she wears.
I wrap both hands around it the way she does.
She always holds mugs with both hands, I’ve watched it more times than I can count, this specific small habit of hers.
I feel the weight of it, stare at the chip on the handle that’s never seemed to bother her, then bring it to my lips.
Not to drink. Just to understand what she touches every morning before she faces the world.
The ceramic is smooth where it isn’t chipped. It smells faintly of coffee and something sweeter underneath.
I put it back exactly where I found it. Lipstick mark facing out.
Her kitchen is small, a little cluttered. But it’s lived in, and that makes a difference. It smells of dish soap and citrus, and underneath everything, cinnamon—always cinnamon, it lives here the way her scent lives in the rest of the apartment, permanent and particular and hers.
I open the fridge slowly, the way you open something that doesn’t belong to you.
Leftovers in mismatched containers stacked with no specific logic.
Oat milk. An apple going soft at one side she hasn’t gotten to yet.
Condiments crowded in the door. And on the middle shelf, a sticky note in her handwriting—Eat me before Wednesday, Sophia—a reminder, an argument with her own future self about leftovers, small and domestic and so entirely her that something in my throat tightens.
On the counter, there’s a grocery list started and abandoned midway through. Bananas. The good dish soap. Shampoo—she’s written the full brand name, underlined it, like she’s told herself before and keeps forgetting. And at the bottom, circled twice, coffee.
I stand there with that for a long moment. Then I photograph it but don’t ask myself why.
I move to the bathroom, and it smells overwhelmingly of her—concentrated, layered. It’s the vanilla and orange-peel of her shampoo, the clean scent of soap, and something underneath both that I think might just be her skin.
I don’t rush. I look at everything. The brands on the shelf above the sink, arranged by some logic only she understands.
A razor with a pink handle. Two hair ties around the faucet.
A half-finished candle on the edge of the tub, something floral.
Peony? And her lipstick, placed on the vanity right next to her perfume.
There’s a slight increase in my pulse as I take the lipstick, ignoring the perfume beside it. Perfume is for other people, for the world she walks through, for crowded rooms and first impressions. Lipstick is different. This has touched her.
I open the black and gold-rimmed container, twisting it outward.
It’s already shaped to the curve of her lips, worn down on the left side slightly more than the right, the precise angle of how she applies it.
I’ve watched her do it through glass, through distance, and now I’m holding the evidence of it in my hands.
I run my thumb across the surface. Slowly. The way you touch something you have no right to touch and do it anyway because the wanting has outgrown the knowing.
The color transfers to the pad of my thumb. Cherry red. Bright against my skin. I look at it for a long moment—this small mark of her on me—and feel a dangerous heat coil in my stomach, a sensation I refuse to acknowledge.
I twist the lipstick back down. Cap it. Place it back on the vanity exactly as I found it. Angled slightly left. Touching the base of the perfume bottle.
I look at my thumb for another moment then leave the bathroom, pulling the door exactly as I found it, and carry that small red mark on my skin through the rest of her apartment like something I stole without taking.
Her bedroom door is open, and I stand in the threshold the way I stood at her front door, taking the time to absorb the weight of it. The gravity of a line that can only be crossed once.
I go in.
The bed is unmade. Of course it is. She never makes it on weekdays, only Sundays.
I know her rhythms by heart now. The ivory sheets are twisted toward one side, her side, the left, and there’s an indentation still in the pillow where her head was this morning.
I don’t let myself look at it for too long.
I look at it for too long.
The mattress gives slightly under my weight as I sit on the bed. I press my palm flat against her sheets—cool now, hours since she left, and I sit there with my hand on her bed in the middle of the afternoon while a familiar ache spreads beneath my ribs, the one I’ve taught myself to ignore.
My gaze moves across the room, taking in every shape, every corner, every item.
Her clothes from yesterday are on the chair in the corner.
A black cardigan draped over the back. Two scarves she barely manages to hold on to when the breeze picks up.
I’m surprised she doesn’t lose them more often, always three steps ahead of herself.
I stand and cross to the chair. Touch the cardigan first. The fabric is worn soft in the way that takes years of choosing—of reaching for the same thing on cold mornings because it’s the one that works, the one that feels right.
I lift it from the chair, hold it, then bring it to my face. And breathe in.
It’s her. Entirely, completely, devastatingly her.
Impossible to frame or crop or filter away.
This isn’t surveillance footage. This is her, distilled to essence, and I’m standing in her bedroom with her cardigan against my face, finally understanding something about myself I’ve been refusing to understand for too long.
I was made to be unmovable. But her? She doesn’t even know she’s moving me. I didn’t even know it before now. Never been able to label it.
I’m not going to be able to stop.
I fold it carefully. Place it back on the chair like it hasn’t been moved an inch. That’s when I see it. On the nightstand. Small. Unremarkable to anyone who didn’t know to look. A notebook with a worn cover, the corners soft from handling, a pen tucked into the elastic band.
I sit back down on her bed and open it the way you open something you already know will change you.
The elastic band first, slow, like rushing would make it more of a violation than it already is. The cover falls back, and her handwriting appears—small, slightly slanted, pressed firmly into the page like she means every word she commits to paper.