CHAPTER 1 #2
The stairs led down to a landing, then another door. Steel, reinforced, with a keypad on the wall beside it. Leo punched in a code—I saw the numbers flash but didn’t memorize them—and the door swung inward on silent hinges.
“Welcome to the panic room,” he said.
It wasn’t what I expected. I’d pictured something utilitarian: concrete walls, a cot, maybe a shelf of canned goods.
Instead, the space was almost warm. The walls were exposed brick, sealed and painted a deep green.
A single bulb hung from the ceiling, glass and Edison-style, casting soft light over a bed that was actually a real bed—mattress on a wooden frame, stacked with quilts.
There was a small bathroom in the corner, separated by a half-wall, and a kitchenette with a sink and a small refrigerator.
The ventilation system hummed faintly overhead.
“This is not a panic room,” I said. “This is a studio apartment.”
“It’s a panic room with amenities.”
“There’s a plant.”
A small fern sat on the nightstand, its fronds unfurling toward the lamp. Leo glanced at it and shrugged.
“It was here when I bought the place. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of it.”
“You’ve been keeping a fern alive in a panic room.”
“It’s low-maintenance.”
I walked inside, letting my fingers trail over the bed frame, the soft edge of a quilt. It smelled different down here—cleaner, less of the smoke-and-copper, more like lavender and old wood. Somewhere in the walls, the ventilation system clicked and a gentle breath of air moved through the room.
“There’s no window,” I said.
“No.”
“And no natural light.”
“No.”
“And you think I’m going to want to sleep down here.”
Leo leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. “You tell me what’s worse. A room with no window, or a room with a window that looks out at a building you’re being kicked out of in ninety days.”
He had a point. A frustrating, infuriating point.
“Fine,” I said again, because it seemed to be the word I kept saying around him. “I’ll try it. But if I wake up at three in the morning and panic because I can’t see the sky, I’m blaming you.”
“You already wake up at three in the morning. I’ve seen your light on.”
I turned to look at him. “You’ve been watching my apartment?”
“It’s hard not to. Your window faces my kitchen.” He said it simply, no follow-up, no explanation. Just the fact of it.
“And what do you do when you see my light on at three in the morning?”
“Think about coming over and telling you to sleep.”
“But you don’t.”
“You’re not my patient.”
The words hung in the air between us, and something shifted. It was subtle—the way he uncrossed his arms and let them fall to his sides, the way the lamplight caught the darkness in his eyes.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
We stood there for a moment too long, and I felt the room press in around us—not claustrophobic, but intimate, the way the walls seemed to lean closer, listening. Leo cleared his throat and pushed off from the doorframe.
“I’ll let you get settled.”
“You’re going home?”
“I’ll be upstairs for a while. Closing counts.” He paused at the top of the spiral stairs, one hand on the railing. “If you need anything, the intercom by the bed connects to the bar. Just press the button.”
“An intercom.”
“Panic room. Conveniences.”
And then he was gone, his footsteps fading up the stairs, and I was alone in the strangest room I’d ever been invited to sleep in.
I didn’t sleep.
Not right away. I sat on the edge of the bed and tested the mattress—firmer than my own, but not uncomfortable—and thought about the chain of events that had led me here. Ninety days. A letter taped to a door. A man with a scar through his eyebrow who kept a panic room with a fern.
My phone buzzed. A text from Leo: Everything downstairs okay?
Fine, I typed back. The fern is judging me.
It does that. Don’t take it personally.
I smiled despite myself and set the phone aside. The lamp cast long shadows across the green walls, and the ventilation hum was steady, like a white noise machine. I kicked off my shoes, peeled off my jeans, and slid under the quilt in my t-shirt. The sheets smelled like cedar and laundry soap.
Sleep came faster than I expected. Dreamless and deep.
I woke to darkness and a sense of being watched. My heart hammered before my eyes could adjust, and I sat up fast, fumbling for the lamp. But there was no one in the room. Just the fern, motionless on the nightstand, and the intercom blinking a soft red light.
A voice crackled through, low and rough with static. “You awake?”
Leo.
I pressed the button. “Now I am.”
“Sorry. Wanted to check before I left.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost four.”
“You’re still here?”
A pause. “Like I said. Closing counts.”
I sat there in the dark, one hand pressed against the cool wall, the other still on the intercom. The moment stretched, and I became aware of how thin my t-shirt was, how warm the bed had gotten, how close the walls seemed.
“Leo?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you offer me this room?”
The intercom crackled. I could hear him breathing on the other end, could picture him leaning against the bar, phone pressed to his ear, that same expression he’d worn when I’d called out the gentian. Thoughtful. Measuring.
“Because I know what it’s like,” he said finally, “to have nowhere else to go.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. The woman who’d crawled out of a wrecked car five years ago—broken ribs, collapsed lung, a gash across her forehead that took forty stitches—she knew something about being lost. Leo had been there for the aftermath, not the in-between.
He’d seen me at my worst and never brought it up. Not once.
“I’m not good at accepting help,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“Even when I need it.”
“Also noticed.”
“So stop making it feel like pity.”
The intercom went quiet. Then: “Come upstairs.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to show you something else.”
I pulled on my jeans, stepped into my shoes, and climbed the spiral stairs. The light above me grew warmer as I neared the top, and when I emerged into the hallway, I could see the soft glow of the bar beyond.
Leo was there, standing behind the counter with two glasses—not cocktail glasses, but simple rocks glasses, each holding an inch of amber liquid.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Aging experiment. Six months in a charred oak cask, finished with a split vanilla bean. I need a second opinion.”
“And you called me up at four in the morning for a tasting?”
“You weren’t sleeping anyway.”
I took the glass. Our fingers brushed, and I felt the calluses on his palm—years of ladder grips and shattered windows, sanded smooth by time. He didn’t pull away.
I lifted the glass to my nose. Vanilla, oak, something warm underneath. A hint of smoke. Then I tasted, and the whole scene shifted—the empty bar around us, the dim lights, the way the bourbon spread across my tongue like a slow flame.
“Well?” he asked.
“It’s good.”
“Just good?”
“It’s the kind of good that makes me understand why you schedule tastings at four in the morning.”
He smiled, a real one that reached his eyes, and for a second I forgot how tired I was. Forgot the letter, the countdown, the weight of the last sixteen hours. There was only the taste of vanilla on my lips and the way Leo was looking at me like I was the only person in the room.
“Taste again,” he said. “Slower.”
I did. The liquid pooled on my tongue, and I held it there, letting the heat bloom. The oak came through first this time, then a sweetness that reminded me of burnt sugar, then a finish that lingered long after I swallowed.
“What do you taste?”
“Like someone lit a campfire in a bakery.”
“Interesting.”
“Good interesting or bad interesting?”
He leaned against the backbar, watching me. “I asked a friend of mine first. He said it tasted like drinking a lumberjack’s breakup.”
“Your friend sounds like an idiot.”
“He’s a poet.”
“Same thing.”
The glass was still in my hand, the warmth of the bourbon spreading through my chest. I was suddenly aware of the space between us—just the width of the bar, but it felt like more.
Felt like all those nights I’d seen his light on from my kitchen window, all those shifts we’d spent circling each other with jokes about muddling and atomic clocks.
“Why did you really bring me down here?” I asked.
“I told you. The room.”
“No. Not the room. The bourbon. The four a.m. tasting. The—” I gestured at the empty bar, the dim lights, the two of us alone. “This.”
He didn’t answer right away. Just took my glass from my hand—our fingers brushing again, slower this time—and set it on the bar beside his own.
“Because I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something,” he said.
“Tell me now.”
His eyes didn’t leave mine. “The building wasn’t being sold. Not yet. I heard about it from the landlord a week ago, and I’ve been trying to find the right moment to mention it.”
The words landed like a stone in still water, and for a second I couldn’t breathe. “You knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me until I found out via a letter taped to the front door?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to offer you the room,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to do it without it sounding like I’d been waiting for an excuse.”
The honesty of it caught me off guard. I blinked at him, the bourbon still warm in my belly, and tried to sort through the tangle of feelings—anger, confusion, something else that had been building for months, something I’d been too tired to name.
“You have been waiting,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“For what?”
He took a step closer—around the bar now, past the register, until he was standing beside me instead of across from me. The heat of him radiated through the space. Six feet two of quiet, patient wanting.
“For you to look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re doing now.”