7. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I had never once stood in my own doorway and watched someone else decide what to think of it.
Isla stepped past me into the apartment and stopped a few feet in, turning in a slow half circle.
She took in the bare walls, the single window facing the water, the mattress on its frame in the corner, like she was reading a report that had come back shorter than she expected.
She crossed to the window and looked down at the water for a moment, silver under the streetlights, and did not say whatever she was thinking about the view either.
"This is it," she said, echoing my own words back at me from the car. "Very minimalist. Very witness protection chic."
"It serves its purpose."
"Which is what, exactly? Punishing furniture for existing?"
I set her bag down by the door and did not answer that, mostly because I did not have a good one ready.
Six years I had lived in these four rooms, and not once had another person stood in the middle of them long enough to have an opinion.
There were no photographs on the walls, no calendar, nothing that told a visitor anything about the man who lived here beyond the fact that he preferred exits to keepsakes.
The apartment smelled like nothing, the particular scentlessness of a place scrubbed clean of anything that might identify the person living inside it. I had built it that way on purpose, the same as everything else, and had never once needed to explain why.
"Locks first," I said instead. "Deadbolt, then chain. Both, every time, no exceptions."
"Even to take out the trash?"
"There is no trash schedule that requires opening this door before I clear the hallway myself."
"That's oddly specific."
"It is specific because I have thought about it more than most people think about anything."
She almost smiled at that, the same almost-smile I had started to recognize as her particular brand of amusement, the kind that refused to fully commit until it decided I had earned it.
"Keep going," she said. "What else does the house rulebook say?"
"Do not open the second drawer in the kitchen without asking first."
"Ominous. What's in it?"
"Things that are mine."
"That's not an answer, that's a warning label."
I let that one go, mostly because she was not entirely wrong and I had no interest in explaining myself over a kitchen drawer five minutes into her being here.
"The schedule," I continued. "I am gone most mornings, back by evening. You do not answer the door for anyone, regardless of what they say they are delivering."
"What if it's actually a delivery?"
"I did not order anything."
"What if I did?"
"You did not have time to order anything. You have been with me since this morning."
She held up both hands in mock surrender.
"Fine. No pizza." She looked almost genuinely wounded by the concept.
"Noted. Filed. Mourned."
The words came out flatter than I meant them to, and something like surprise crossed her face, as if she had not expected a joke from me.
"One more rule," I said. "If you hear anything through that door that is not me, you do not open it. You call the number I gave you, and you wait."
"And if it's you, but something's wrong?"
"Then you will already know the difference. Trust that."
She studied me for a beat, some of the joking falling away. "Okay. I can do that."
Something in her voice told me she meant it, the same steadiness she probably used on frightened patients a hundred times before.
I moved through the apartment ahead of her, closing the bedroom door out of habit before she reached it, the same fast motion I used on every door in every room I had ever lived in.
She caught it, the way she seemed to catch most things.
"You really don't like open doors," she said.
"I like knowing what is behind them."
"That's not the same thing."
"It is close enough."
"Is that why you're still wearing long sleeves in your own apartment? At ten at night, with the heat clearly working fine?"
I glanced down at my own forearm, at the cuff already pulled to my wrist without my deciding to put it there. "Habit."
"Even when nobody's here to see it?"
"Especially then. Habits do not know the difference between an audience and an empty room."
She studied me for a moment longer than the answer required, then let it go, which I appreciated more than I said out loud.
It was not the first time she had looked past an explanation to the shape underneath it, and I doubted it would be the last, no matter how many times I handed her nothing but the surface of an answer.
I pulled out a chair at the small table by the window, angling it the way I always angled every chair in every room, so the good side of my face sat toward whoever might walk in and the ruined side stayed to the wall.
I had done it so many times over six years that I no longer thought about the motion, only noticed if a chair had somehow ended up wrong.
Isla noticed. She noticed nearly everything, which I was beginning to understand was less a professional habit and more simply who she was underneath the scrubs and the clipboard.
"Every chair in this place faces the same direction," she said, glancing between the table, the two chairs by the window, and the single armchair angled toward the door. "That's not decorating. That's a strategy."
"It is efficient."
"It's a tell."
I did not answer that, because she was right and I had nothing useful to say about being right.
"Where am I sleeping?" she asked, glancing at the mattress in the corner like she already suspected the answer and did not love it.
"You will take the bed. I do not need much sleep."
"Somehow I don't believe that, but fine. Be a martyr about it."
"It is efficient."
"You really do only have three settings, don't you? Efficient, accurate, and mildly threatening."
"I have others. I simply do not waste them on furniture arrangements."
She wandered toward the small kitchen, running one finger along the edge of the counter like she was checking for dust more out of habit than judgment.
"Do you cook?" she asked.
"No."
"At all?"
"I can make coffee. I consider that sufficient."
"That's called surviving, not cooking."
"I have survived on less."
"What's actually in your fridge? I'm almost afraid to look."
"Water. Eggs. Something in a jar I no longer trust."
"Your fridge belongs in an evidence locker, not a kitchen." She opened the refrigerator anyway, peered inside, and shut it again with the particular speed of someone confirming her worst suspicions.
"We're ordering something. Tonight, at least." She pulled open the drawer by the stove.
"I refuse to start my witness protection experience on eggs and regret."
She thumbed through a stack of takeout menus gone soft at the corners. "Thai, Greek, or a pizza place I refuse to believe is still in business given how old this menu looks."
"The Thai place delivers fastest. Ask for the dumplings. Not the spring rolls."
"Was that an opinion? Did I just get an actual food opinion out of you?"
"I have opinions. I simply save them for things that deserve one."
"Dumplings over spring rolls is apparently one of the great causes of your life."
"It is a small kitchen. I have to care about something in it."
"I'll allow it. Dumplings it is." She set the menu down like the matter was formally closed.
That almost got a real laugh out of her, the kind I had heard only once before, in a car, over a joke that was not mine.
She opened a cabinet and found exactly three mugs. She held up the least chipped of the three with something close to triumph.
"This one's the good one, isn't it? I can tell. It's the one without the crack running halfway down the handle."
"It is the only one that does not leak onto my hand."
"High praise. I'm framing that."
Something eased in my chest, small and unfamiliar, watching her hold up a cheap mug like she had found something worth keeping in a place I had built specifically so there would be nothing worth keeping in it.
"You can use that one," I said. "While you are here."
"Wow. An honor, truly." She set it back on the shelf with more care than the moment strictly required, and I noticed that too.
Something in me came close to a smile at the sight of her rearranging my kitchen without asking permission, the same way she had rearranged the last six days without asking permission for that either.
She moved to the small dresser against the far wall next, the one drawer I had forgotten to mention, because I had not thought anyone would ever be standing close enough to open it.
I did not stop her. I told myself there was nothing in there that mattered, the same lie I had been telling myself about that drawer for longer than I could easily count.
"Looking for a blanket," she said, already sliding it open before I could tell her not to. "It gets cold in here at night. I could feel it just standing by the window."
Her hand stilled halfway through the fabric.
"Oh." She lifted a photograph out from where it had settled beneath a folded shirt, holding it toward the lamp like she needed better light to be sure of what she was looking at.
"I wasn't snooping. I promise, I was just looking for a blanket."
Four young men stood in the frame, arms slung over each other's shoulders, caught mid laugh at something outside the camera's reach.
All four of them whole, unmarked, the kind of easy, unguarded look that only ever showed up in photographs taken before anyone in the picture understood what the world was going to do to them.
I recognized every face. I had not looked at that photograph in longer than I let myself count.
Three of those faces I would never see again outside my own memory.
"Is this you?" she asked, soft, careless, the question of someone who had no idea she had just picked up something with teeth.
"You look so young. Who are the other three?"
I crossed the room before I decided to move, and took the photograph out of her hands without a word.
She let it go easily, startled by how fast I had closed the distance between us, her fingers still curved around the space where the picture had been a second earlier.
For a moment neither of us moved, the apartment gone as quiet as it had been before she ever walked into it.
The room went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the window. I could feel her watching the change happen, the same way I watched things happen to other people, cataloguing it without meaning to.
My hand found the edge of the photograph harder than it needed to, my knuckles white around a piece of paper that weighed nothing at all.
"Nikolai," she said carefully. "I didn't mean anything by it."
I said nothing. I was not certain, in that moment, that I trusted my own voice to come out anything close to level.
Nobody had ever looked at me like that before, without judgment, at something about myself I could not even explain to myself. I did not know what to do with that, so I did the only thing that had ever worked. I made it stop.
I set the photograph face down on the counter, careful with it in a way that contradicted how fast I had taken it from her, like it might otherwise catch fire on its own.
"It is late," I said.
It was not an answer to anything she had asked.