Three months later.
Corbin hated mornings. Not from tiredness — sleep came when he allowed it, and when it didn't, his body adapted.
He hated the noise. Brakes, neighbors, doors down the hall, arguments in the parking lot. The world waking up.
He preferred the dead hours. His third-floor apartment was quiet, clean, organized — maybe too organized. Everything had a place. The kitchen held only what he used. A couch, a television, a bookshelf. No photographs. No trinkets. Nothing unnecessary.
Objects became memories, and memories became inconvenient.
His phone sat face-down on the counter. It vibrated once. He ignored it. It vibrated again.
"Persistent."
He checked the screen: an unknown number. Job available. Details attached.
He deleted it. Not because he didn't need the money. He simply wasn't working today. Work would keep. Work always kept.
He poured black coffee, took a sip, grimaced, added a splash of cream. The world would wait. He had standards. The cream helped. Marginally.
Then the heavy door at the end of the exterior hallway creaked open.
Light, uneven footsteps in the carpeted corridor. They stopped. A familiar voice: "Morning."
He opened his door. Samantha stood two doors down, fumbling with her key. Short dark-brown hair, brown eyes heavy with sleep. Striking without trying.
He'd seen her for eight months — the stairwell, the metal mailboxes downstairs, once in the rain by the dumpster. Twenty words exchanged, total. There was usually a boyfriend in rotation, so he'd never paid her much mind.
"Hey," she said, catching him in the doorway. She nodded at the mug in his hand. "Please tell me that isn't your first cup. You look like the morning personally offended you."
"It is my first. It hasn't helped yet. I'm not built for this part of the day."
"Lucky you. I haven't slept yet, so technically I'm still working on yesterday." She paused in her doorway. "And you're up early for a night owl."
"It's nine."
"Exactly. Practically dawn, for you."
She grinned and closed her door.
Corbin watched the empty hallway, then closed his own.
The day did what days did when he refused work. It got in the way.
He worked out. Showered. Ate standing at the counter because sitting down would have made the meal feel like an event. The apartment was already clean. He cleaned it anyway — counters, sink, shelves that were already straight — and disliked how clearly he could hear himself doing it.
By noon, he had run out of useful things to pretend were necessary.
He settled on the couch with a book: Summer of Fawkes, a thriller about a masked man leaving bodies and riddles around a city. Corbin had bought it because the premise annoyed him. By page forty, it annoyed him less. The killer was theatrical, which Corbin considered a professional defect. But he was patient. Patience, Corbin understood.
At three, the parking lot filled with the sounds of people coming home to lives that had furniture out of place.
At five, raised voices came from Samantha's apartment.
No words. Just the shapes of them. Hers first — sharp and tired. Then a man's, louder, trying to end the conversation with volume. Something thumped against a wall or a door.
Corbin set the book face-down on the cushion and listened.
Distances. Doors. Whether anyone was in immediate danger. Those were professional considerations. They did not explain why he was still standing in the middle of his living room a full minute later, one hand resting on the closed book.
The man's voice rose again. Samantha's didn't.
Then a door slammed hard enough to travel through the frame. Footsteps passed Corbin's door without slowing. A minute later, the building's front door thudded shut.
After that, nothing came from her apartment. No television. No music. No water running. A silence with a different texture than his own.
He told himself it wasn't his business. He had eight months of practice at that.
He picked up the book and read the same paragraph four times.
Evening came down the hallway in long shadows. He made coffee he didn't want and drank it anyway. The building settled by degrees — pipes, footsteps, a television somewhere below — until the only sound he was listening for was the one that hadn't come.
Her door opening.
That night the knock came. Three short, hesitant raps.
He glanced at the microwave clock: 10:47 p.m.
Nobody visited him. Nobody had reason to know where he lived.
He crossed the room without a sound and looked through the peephole.
Samantha. Gray sweatpants, an oversized faded sweatshirt, arms wrapped around herself. Cold. Uncomfortable.
He opened the door. "Sam?"
She flinched, head snapping up. "Hey. Sorry — I know it's late, and I know this is weird. I just stood here for a full minute trying to talk myself out of knocking." She hugged herself tighter and gave him a thin smile. "It didn't work."
"You're cold."
"This hallway is freezing."
"It's heated."
"Then it's doing a terrible job." The smile held for a second before it faltered. "Do you have any food? Crackers, bread, cereal — honestly, anything you were thinking about throwing away would look pretty good right now."
He ran a mental inventory of his cabinets. Half a loaf of bread. Three eggs. A jar of peanut butter he'd opened in February.
"I have eggs and toast."
She exhaled. "Seriously?"
"Unless the bread has gone bad since I last checked."
"Corbin, that's not emergency food. That's breakfast. That's practically luxury."
He studied her — the dark circles under her eyes, the tense set of her jaw, her messy hair. "Are you okay?"
"Not really." She laughed once, embarrassed by the honesty of it. "My boyfriend left today. The power company shut me off yesterday, so I got to sit in a dark apartment and decide which of those I felt worse about. I haven't figured it out yet."
"When did you last eat?"
"Half a granola bar this morning. I saved the other half in case things got worse, which should tell you how optimistic I was feeling."
"That isn't breakfast."
"It was when there was only one." Her eyes went wet. She looked away quickly, but not before he saw it.
He stepped back and opened the door wider.
She hesitated. "You don't even know my name."
"Samantha. It's on the mailbox downstairs."
"That's either observant or the beginning of a stalking problem."
"Observant."
"That is exactly what a stalker would say."
"Probably. Are you coming in?"
"Are you sure? Because you don't have to do this. I can just — I don't know. Go back and negotiate with the other half of the granola bar."
"Sam, it's almost eleven. You're freezing in the hallway and asking a man you barely know for crackers. I'm sure."
She laughed — small, but real. "Okay. When you put it like that, the granola bar doesn't stand a chance."
"Your kitchen is very... clean," she said, looking around. "Actually, clean isn't the right word. It looks like a kitchen in a furniture catalog — the kind nobody's supposed to actually cook in."
"It's a kitchen."
"Well, mine has character."
"Yours probably has roaches, too. That's not character. That's just gross."
She stared at him, offended despite herself — then giggled. "It does not have roaches."
Still smiling, she kept looking around. "No pictures? No decorations? Not even one takeout menu stuck to the fridge that you're pretending you might use again?"
"I use what I need. Everything else collects dust."
"That's the real reason? Dust?"
"It's a practical reason."
"It's also the first one you thought of." She smiled. "You're kind of intense, you know that? Intense, and weirdly prepared for an emergency involving toast."
"You knocked on a stranger's door at night looking for bread."
"Fair point." She sat at the counter. "So are you actually cooking, or was the menu just theoretical?"
"I can scramble eggs and make toast."
"Then it's a five-star meal."
"It's eggs, Sam."
"It's warm food that somebody else is making. Five stars. I don't make the rules."
"Don't get your hopes up. It's mostly butter and heat."
She watched him work. "Let me guess — you only cook when you're hungry."
"That's usually when it becomes necessary."
"Revolutionary system."
"It works."
"I still can't decide if you're funny or just very strange."
"There's some overlap."
She laughed again.
For a moment neither spoke. The apartment was quiet — a comfortable quiet, different from the silence he usually kept.
He glanced at her.
"Okay, you're staring again."
"I was thinking."
"That's usually when people get into trouble. What were you thinking?"
"Nothing important."
"That answer has never reassured anyone in the history of the world." She leaned her elbows on the counter. "Can I ask you something instead? Why did you let me in? You barely know me. For all you know, I'm the hallway's most charming burglar."
He could have given a dozen answers. None entirely true. He turned back to the pan. "You looked hungry. And cold."
"That's it?"
"That was enough. I also don't like the idea of someone standing outside my door trying not to cry over half a granola bar."
"I wasn't crying."
"Your eyes were."
She smiled faintly. "Most people would have shut the door."
"Most people lock theirs."
"Very noble of you."
"Don't spread that around."
She laughed, and he allowed himself a small smile before returning to the stove.
For the first time in a long time, his mind wasn't running calculations. No target, no exits, no extraction route.
She ate like someone who'd forgotten what sitting down felt like. He refilled her water without asking.
Just dinner.
And for the first time since moving into the building, Corbin looked at Samantha and genuinely wondered who she was — and why he suddenly cared.
"You should get some sleep," he said.
"Let me finish eating first. Then I'll sleep — probably wherever I happen to fall over."
"Eat first. Then sleep."
"Bossy."
"Practical."