Chapter 7

Daniel had slept.

He hadn’t expected to. He had lain down on the bed in the unfamiliar room fully prepared to stare at the ceiling for hours, his thoughts too loud and too tangled to allow anything as peaceful as sleep. But the mattress was soft in a way that felt almost unreasonable, and the room was quiet in a way the city never was, and somewhere between one thought and the next his body had simply given up and pulled him under.

He woke up to light coming through the curtains he hadn’t closed properly, falling across the floor in a wide pale stripe. For a moment he didn’t know where he was.

Then he remembered.

He sat up slowly and looked around the room.

It was large. Larger than his entire living room and bedroom combined back at the apartment. The walls were a soft grey that looked different depending on where the light hit them. There was a wide window that looked out over the back of the property, and through it, Daniel could see a stretch of garden that went further than he could follow, green and still and perfectly kept.

The furniture was simple but expensive in the way that simple things sometimes were. A wardrobe. A desk. A chair by the window. A bathroom through the door on the left that had been stocked with things he hadn’t asked for, soap and towels and a toothbrush still in its packaging, all of it placed neatly like a hotel that knew you were coming.

On the desk, there was a small folded piece of paper.

Daniel got up and opened it.

It was a list of numbers. Tim’s, he assumed, and Leo’s, and one labelled simply House, which he guessed meant Mrs Alves or someone like her. At the bottom, in the same clean handwriting, were three words.

Call if needed.

Daniel folded it back up and set it down.

He used the bathroom and washed his face and stood in front of the mirror for a moment looking at himself. He looked tired. Not just from last night but from something deeper, like the last three years had been quietly wearing him down in ways he hadn’t noticed until now when there was nothing left covering it.

He looked away from the mirror.

There was a set of clothes folded on the chair by the window that hadn’t been there when he fell asleep. He didn’t know when they had appeared or who had brought them in, and the idea of someone entering the room while he slept made him uncomfortable in a way he pushed aside because there was no point adding it to everything else.

The clothes fit well enough. Better than they should have for someone who had just guessed his size.

He made the bed out of habit, smoothing the sheets with his hands even though he knew someone else would probably do it, and then he stood in the middle of the room and thought about what to do next.

He couldn’t leave.

That was the shape of things, the hard edge underneath everything soft in this room. He could move around inside it, could make it feel almost normal if he tried hard enough, but the walls of it were real even if he couldn’t see them.

He decided to find out exactly where they were.

He opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway.

It was quiet. The kind of quiet that big houses have, where the space itself absorbs sound before it can travel. He walked slowly, looking at everything, trying to build a map of the place in his head. There were other doors along the hallway, all closed. A painting on the wall that he stopped in front of for a moment, something abstract and dark that he couldn’t decide whether he liked or not.

He took the stairs down.

The ground floor was just as quiet. He passed the sitting room and looked in without entering, then found his way to what turned out to be a kitchen at the back of the house. It was large and well equipped and smelled faintly of coffee, and sitting at the counter with a mug and his phone was Leo.

Leo looked up when Daniel appeared in the doorway.

“Morning,” he said, like it was perfectly natural for Daniel to be wandering around the house. “Again. Coffee?”

“Please,” Daniel said, because he needed something to do with his hands.

He sat down at the counter while Leo poured, and accepted the mug when it was handed to him and wrapped his hands around it the same way he had with the cup in the car. The kitchen felt more manageable than the rest of the house. Less designed to impress. More used.

“Did you sleep?” Leo asked, settling back onto his own stool.

“Surprisingly yes,” Daniel said.

Leo nodded like this made sense. “The beds here are ridiculous. I fell asleep in one of the guest rooms once waiting for a meeting to finish and I was out for four hours.” He said it without any self-consciousness, like it was just a fact about the world. “Woke up and Tim was standing in the doorway looking at me like I’d done something offensive.”

Daniel looked at him. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. That was the offensive part.” Leo picked up his mug. “He has this way of just looking at you that communicates a whole paragraph.”

Daniel knew exactly what he meant. He had been on the receiving end of that look more than once in the last twelve hours.

He drank his coffee and looked around the kitchen. Through the window above the sink, he could see the garden again, closer now, a stone path running between sections of it toward something he couldn’t quite make out in the distance.

“Can I go outside?” he asked.

Leo glanced at the window and then back at Daniel. “In the garden?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” Leo said simply. “The garden is fine.”

Daniel noticed he didn’t say anything beyond that. Didn’t add a condition or a qualifier. But the way he said it, the way he defined it specifically as the garden, told Daniel everything he needed to know about where the line was.

He finished his coffee and Leo took him out through a set of glass doors at the back of the kitchen.

The garden was even larger up close than it had looked from the window. The stone path branched in several directions, leading through sections that were clearly tended to with serious care. There were flowers Daniel couldn’t name and hedges trimmed into shapes and a stretch of open lawn that was a green so even it almost didn’t look real.

At the far end, he could see the wall.

It was high and stone and ran the full length of the property as far as he could tell. Beyond it, there was nothing visible, just sky. The city that Daniel had lived in his whole life was somewhere on the other side of that wall, carrying on without him, and he couldn’t see any part of it from here.

He stood on the path and looked at the wall for a long moment.

Leo stood a few feet behind him, not speaking, giving him the space to look.

“How big is the property?” Daniel asked.

“Big,” Leo said. Not unhelpfully, just honestly.

Daniel nodded slowly. He turned away from the wall and looked back at the house instead. From out here it looked even larger than it had from the front, its windows catching the morning light, its size completely matter-of-fact against the sky.

He thought about his apartment. The walls had been slightly too thin so you could hear the neighbours sometimes. The kitchen only fit one person comfortably. The window in the bedroom faced another building so closely that he had never fully opened the curtains.

He had loved it.

Not because it was special. Because it was his.

“Leo,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Does anyone ever leave? People who live here, I mean. Not the staff. Not for work.” He paused, trying to find the honest version of the question. “Does anyone just leave because they want to?”

Leo was quiet for a moment.

It was the kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much truth to offer.

“It’s not really that kind of place,” he said finally.

Daniel looked at the garden around him, at the stone path and the perfect hedges and the flowers that someone tended to every day with careful hands.

“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think so.”

He stood there a little longer, breathing the outside air, letting himself have that much at least. Then he turned back toward the house.

He had started to walk back up the path when the glass doors opened and Mrs Alves appeared, her expression as unreadable as it had been that morning.

“Mr Black would like you to join him for lunch,” she said. Not a question.

Daniel looked at her for a moment.

Then he looked back at the wall one more time.

Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there.”

He followed her back inside, and the garden doors closed behind him, and the sound of the outside world disappeared as completely as if it had never been there at all.