Chapter 8
The faucet had stopped dripping, and I stood in my bathroom doorway at seven in the morning, still in the T-shirt I’d slept in, staring at a fixture that had been quietly betraying me since April, and felt a laugh come up out of my chest that had absolutely no business being there given everything else this meant.
I turned the handle on, then off, then on again, just to watch the water behave itself, clean and obedient, no drip, no seep, nothing.
He’d even wiped down the counter. There wasn’t a single water spot on the porcelain, which somehow felt more invasive than if he’d left a mess, because a mess would have been human and this was something closer to surgical.
I was still standing there when my phone buzzed with a text from Rosa that read only: coffee, and I understood that this was not a request so much as a summons, the kind Rosa had probably been issuing to teenagers with hall passes for forty years before she retired and redirected all that authority toward apartment building gossip.
She had the door open before I finished knocking, mug already extended toward me like she’d started the handoff the second she heard my footsteps on the walkway.
“Your shy boyfriend fixed my sticky door yesterday,” she said, without preamble, the way she said most things, as if the conversation had already been happening in her head and she was just now letting me catch up.
“Quiet one. Didn’t say much beyond looking at the hinges, but he had it swinging clean in ten minutes.
You could learn something from a man who doesn’t talk your ear off. ”
I held very still, the way I’d learned to hold still around Rosa when I didn’t want her to see exactly how much a piece of information had landed. “What did he look like?”
“Tall. Dark hair, cut short. Quiet eyes.” She sipped her coffee and studied me over the rim of the mug with the specific patience of a woman who had spent decades getting information out of people who didn’t want to give it.
“Toolbag. Good manners. Called himself shy when I called him your boyfriend, didn’t correct me on the boyfriend part, though. ”
I was paying attention. I was paying so much attention that my hands had gone a little cold around my own mug, because that was Caleb, unmistakably, down to the not correcting Rosa on a word he had every professional reason to correct if he’d wanted to keep himself invisible in this building.
I didn’t know why he’d let it stand. Maybe there hadn’t been a clean way to argue with Rosa without making himself more memorable, not less.
Maybe it meant something else entirely. I filed it away instead of deciding.
“He fixed my faucet too,” I said, testing how the sentence felt out loud.
“Well, there you go.” Rosa said it like I’d just confirmed something she already had filed away. “Man’s useful. You could do worse.”
I did not tell Rosa that the man was a private investigator who had entered my apartment without permission to fix a broken window latch before I’d asked him to fix anything, and that the faucet was the first thing I’d actually invited him to touch.
I drank my coffee, thanked her, and walked back to my own apartment already composing the phone call I owed Dani before I’d even reached my own front door.
“Say the sentence again,” Dani said, once I had her on speaker and had, in fact, said the sentence.
“He fixed the faucet. Rosa met him. It worked.”
“It worked,” Dani repeated, in the exact tone of someone reading the label off a product that had just malfunctioned in front of a live audience.
“Josie. You left a note inviting a man who broke into your apartment to come back into your apartment, and it worked, and you are telling me this like it’s good news. ”
“It’s information,” I said. “Information is good news, generally, in my experience.”
“Your experience is currently a data set of one faucet.” She exhaled, long and slow. “Fine. If you insist on calling it a study, we run it like one. Send me every note before it goes up, every response the same night, and your honest read before you have time to make it prettier.”
“Got it,” I said, and meant it, because some part of me that was still shaking a little from yesterday wanted exactly this, wanted somebody outside my own head keeping a ledger I couldn’t quietly edit later.
“Say it back to me. What goes in the file?”
“Every note, every response, every time, every read. Same night.” I sat down at my kitchen table with the legal pad already in front of me, block letters waiting. “I’m writing the next ones now, actually.”
“Of course you are.” A pause, and then, quieter, the part of Dani that worried instead of managed: “Are you sleeping? Actually sleeping, not lying there running the sightline math.”
“Getting there,” I said, which wasn’t quite a lie and wasn’t quite the truth either, and she let it go because we both knew pushing wouldn’t get me to say anything truer.
I wrote three notes that morning, and I made myself write them as three notes, three separate sheets torn from the pad, because if this was a system, I wanted it to behave like one, distinct tasks with distinct edges, not a single sprawling invitation that could be read as more than I meant it to be.
The first: SMOKE DETECTOR IN THE HALLWAY IS CHIRPING. NEEDS A NEW BATTERY. NINE-VOLT, IN THE JUNK DRAWER.
The second: THERE IS A SPIDER IN MY BATHTUB. I AM NOT DEALING WITH IT. YOU ARE TALLER THAN ME AND PRESUMABLY brAVER.
The third: A PACKAGE WAS SUPPOSED TO ARRIVE TUESDAY. IT DID NOT. CHECK THE FRONT OFFICE AND THE NEIGHBORS BEFORE YOU ASSUME IT WAS STOLEN.
I read that last one twice, satisfied that I’d kept it to ordinary means, the kind of thing anyone might do for a neighbor, and not an invitation to go digging through delivery records or knocking down whatever wall stood between a missing box and an answer.
Then, on a fourth sheet, in the same block letters, no different weight to the pen, because I wanted it to look like its own document and not an afterthought tacked on out of fear:
THIS PERMISSION COVERS THE THREE THINGS LISTED ABOVE. NOTHING ELSE. YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN.
I photographed all four pages before I taped them up, the way Dani wanted, and texted her the pictures with a caption that just said going up now, and got back a single thumbs up that somehow still managed to convey her entire ongoing opinion of my judgment.
I taped the four notes in a row along the kitchen window in the same spot as before, checked the sightline the way I had the first time, and did not point at anything or smile at the glass.
It felt important, this time, to leave the tone flatter.
A joke could be an invitation. A list could just be a list, if I let it.
I didn’t expect answers to all three at once.
The battery and the package were the kind of tasks that could sit for days, waiting on schedules and post offices and other people’s availability.
The spider was the one that would tell me something fast, because a bathtub only holds a spider’s patience for so long, and mine even less.
The spider was still there when I went to bed, small and patient and completely unbothered by the fact that its continued existence had become a documented item in an ongoing experiment involving a private investigator.
It was gone by morning. Not gone the way spiders go, vanished down some drain or crushed into a tissue and forgotten.
Gone deliberately, relocated with what I could only describe as consideration, because when I opened my front door there was a drinking glass sitting upside down on the walkway outside, propped at one edge with a folded matchbook to leave an air gap, the spider still alive and pacing slow circles inside it like it had questions about its transportation.
I stood in the doorway looking at the glass and its careful half-inch air gap.
The man had broken into my apartment without asking and still could not bring himself to let a spider suffocate on his way out.
I didn’t yet trust what that made me feel.
The stranger’s small mercy sat six inches from my welcome mat while my bare feet went cold against the concrete.