Chapter 7
The note sat square in the kitchen window, block letters, no flourish, the kind of handwriting a person uses when they want a message read once and understood completely. THE BATHROOM FAUCET IS LEAKING. SINCE YOU ALREADY KNOW WHERE I KEEP THE SPARE KEY.
I read it twice through the long lens before I let myself lower the camera, and the second read didn’t change the first. She knew.
Not suspected, not wondered, knew, with enough certainty to write it down and tape it to glass at the angle that would put it in front of whatever vehicle I was using that day.
She’d found the sightline herself, worked it out the way she worked out everything, and now my own competence was pointed back at me, a scope sighted in on my own position.
I sat in the van a long time with the engine off, doing the thing I do with evidence when I don’t like what it’s telling me, which is check it again anyway.
There were three honest paths in front of me.
I could leave Rover Street tonight and not come back, treat the note as a warning shot instead of an invitation, which was probably what a reasonable man would do.
I could call it in on myself, walk into the property office or pick up the phone and tell someone in a position of authority exactly what I’d done that afternoon, latch and screws and a stolen key code, and let the consequences land where they landed.
That was the version of myself I’d have respected if I were reading this cold, the version I’d have written up without hesitation if Trent Holloway had done something a tenth this invasive.
I did neither. I sat with the note in the lens and felt a decision settle behind my ribs I’d apparently already made before I finished weighing it, which told me more about myself than I wanted to know at seven o’clock on a Tuesday.
She hadn’t invited me back for a conversation.
She’d invited me back for a faucet. I made myself hold on to that distinction like it was load-bearing, because it was the only thing standing between what I was about to do and what I’d done earlier that same day without permission.
A leaking faucet, named specifically, was a boundary drawn in the shape of itself.
It authorized a wrench and nothing else.
Not her closet. Not her nightstand. Not the two doors down that hallway I hadn’t opened the first time either.
If I blurred that line even once, I’d have proven every ugly thing about myself I’d been telling myself I wasn’t, since the day I picked this line of work because I was good at watching people and bad at leaving them alone.
I gave it another twenty minutes to make sure the courtyard had settled for the evening, families in for dinner, the last dog walker gone, the hour when a building exhales, and then I went to the stairwell and worked the four digits I already knew I shouldn’t know and took the key like it belonged to me for as long as I needed it to.
I brought my own tools this time, the kind that fit in a jacket pocket instead of a van. Her invitation was narrow. My presence didn’t have to look like anything more than what it was supposed to be, a man doing a small favor he’d been asked to do, and that was the only permission I planned to use.
The apartment smelled the same, coffee and something citrus underneath it, and I kept my eyes on the floor in front of me as I had before, past the living room, into the small bathroom off the hall.
The faucet was leaking, a thin, patient drip against the porcelain.
I had the washer replaced and the packing nut reseated in under six minutes, testing the handle twice, running the water hot and then cold to check for give in the line. When I was done, it shut off clean.
I wiped the counter down out of habit and left the apartment the way I’d found it, door locked behind me, key back in the box, four digits closed over it like nothing had moved.
I was three steps from the stairwell when a door opened on the ground floor and a woman came out onto the walkway holding a mug with both hands, silver-streaked hair, a cardigan that had no business existing in this heat.
She looked at the toolbag in my hand, then at unit twelve behind me, then back at me, with the kind of open, unhurried curiosity that meant she’d already done the arithmetic before I’d finished descending the stairs.
“You headed out of Josie’s place,” she said, not quite a question, her eyes going to the bag again. “Faucet’s been dripping since spring. I hear it through the ceiling.”
“Fixed now,” I said, because denying it felt like the worse move.
“Rosa,” she said, extending the mug hand briefly before switching it back to holding her coffee properly.
“Unit six. I’m right below her.” She studied me a beat longer, the way I imagined she’d once studied teenagers claiming they’d turned in a form they hadn’t. “You’re awfully quiet for a boyfriend.”
I opened my mouth to correct the word and found I had no clean sentence ready that wouldn’t require explaining the actual shape of what I was, which was not a category Rosa Alvarez was equipped to hear at eight o’clock on a Tuesday, or possibly ever.
“Shy,” I said instead, which had the benefit of being partially true in ways she couldn’t verify.
“Mm.” She didn’t look convinced so much as satisfied to have a working theory. “Come have coffee. I just made a pot and it’s criminal to drink it alone in this heat, don’t ask me why I still make a full pot, I’ve been doing it forty years and I’m not stopping now.”
Refusing would have meant explaining myself, and explaining myself was the one thing I had no intention of doing standing in a lit hallway with my toolbag still in hand, so I followed her the short distance to her open door and let her put a mug in my hands before I’d fully agreed to any of it.
Her apartment felt warm despite the actual temperature, photographs on every flat surface, a crocheted throw over the back of a chair that looked older than me.
She talked while she moved through her kitchen with the ease of someone who’d hosted a thousand small unscheduled visits exactly like this one, about a leak in unit four two summers back, about how the building’s water pressure had never once made sense to her.
“You any good with doors?” she said, sliding it in the way she’d slid in the boyfriend, like she’d already decided the answer and was only being polite by asking. “Mine sticks something awful. Have to lean my whole shoulder into it every morning like I’m breaking into my own bedroom.”
“I can look at it,” I said, and heard the sentence land in the room with more weight than I’d intended, because I was standing in a stranger’s kitchen accepting an assignment from a woman who thought I was dating someone I’d broken into a home to touch a window latch for, and somehow this had become the most honest exchange I’d had in days.
“Before you leave today, you look at this door,” Rosa said, already refilling my mug without asking, already folding me into the small permanent architecture of the building the way she’d folded in every other fact she’d collected about her neighbors over forty years of full pots of coffee. “Sticks at the top. Door’s right here.”
“Show me,” I said. Rosa had drawn the boundary one task wide and left me standing at it with a mug in my hand. I set the mug down, tightened the loose top hinge, planed the swollen edge, and had the door swinging clean in ten minutes.