CHAPTER FIVE: THE KNOCK

The knocking came again.

Three sharp raps against wood, each one landing like a stone thrown at still water, the sound rippling outward through Maya's chest and spreading into her fingertips. She pressed her back harder against the headboard, both hands wrapped around her own throat where the dream-fingers had been, checking again for what she already knew wasn't there.

Nothing. Just her pulse. Fast. Too fast.

It was a dream.

She said it to herself the way she used to talk down frightened patients in the ER, firmly, without room for argument. You're okay. You're breathing. Look at the room. Name five things you can see.

The water stain on the ceiling shaped like a misshapen star. The single lamp she'd left on in the corner, casting its familiar amber circle on the wall. Her nursing bag slumped against the dresser like a tired friend. The pregnancy vitamins on the nightstand, the bottle catching the light. Her own hands, trembling slightly, still pressed to her throat.

Five things. She was here. She was real. She was fine.

The knocking came a third time.

Maya flinched so hard she knocked the back of her head against the headboard. The sound hit her like it was happening inside her skull, each rap reverberating outward in a way that made her teeth ache. She pressed her palms flat over her ears instinctively, a child's reflex, useless and immediate.

And that was wrong. She understood that immediately, even through the fog of the nightmare.

The knocking was not loud. She knew this the way a nurse knew the difference between a patient describing pain and a patient in actual crisis — not from what was said, but from the accumulating evidence of everything else. The walls of her apartment building were thin but not absent. She could hear the Garcias on the floor below when they argued, a low murmur of Spanish that drifted up through the floorboards like something simmering. She could hear the elevator when it ran, the soft mechanical groan of it settling between floors.

She had never heard knocking as though it was happening inside her head.

Maya lowered her hands slowly. The knock came again, softer this time, almost tentative, and she forced herself to track it, the way she'd been taught to track a patient's vitals, clinically, without panic.

Listen. Actually listen.

It was coming from her front door. Normal door knocking, knuckles on wood, maybe thirty feet away down the short hallway of her apartment. Normal volume. The kind of sound that should register as background noise at this distance, that should require a moment's attention to identify.

But she had heard it like it was happening in her bedroom. Like it was right next to her ear.

Maya sat with that for a moment, her heart still hammering its too-fast rhythm against her ribs.

The pup is powerful, the doctor had said. You'll experience rapid changes. Heightened senses.

She hadn't understood it then. She'd been too deep in shock, in the pale, fluorescent-lit unreality of that examination room, sitting on a paper-covered table with her hands in her lap, listening to words her medical training had no framework for receiving. Heightened senses had sounded like a footnote. A side effect, like nausea or fatigue. Something to note and manage.

She had not understood that it would mean hearing her neighbor's knuckles on her front door as though someone was drumming their fingers directly against her eardrum.

The knock again. Still patient. A little uncertain now, the rhythm of someone who was starting to wonder if they had the wrong door.

Maya exhaled carefully. She pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold against her bare feet and she noted that too — registered the temperature with a clarity that felt new and intrusive, like a dial that had been turned up without her permission.

She grabbed the oversized cardigan from the foot of the bed and pulled it around herself, then padded down the hallway toward the front door.

"Who is it?"

Her own voice surprised her. It came out steadier than she felt, which was either a sign of real composure or the particular kind of autopilot her body ran when her mind was too overwhelmed to participate in basic functioning. She'd operated on that autopilot through most of her shift during James's hospitalization. She recognized its texture.

"Maya, it's Priya. From next door. I'm so sorry to knock so late, beta, but there is a sound…"

Maya unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door.

Mrs. Priya Patel stood in the hallway in a peacock-blue dressing gown, her silver-streaked hair in a long braid over one shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up on her head where she'd clearly forgotten them. She was sixty-three years old, five feet tall, and possessed of a personal dignity so complete and unshakeable that she managed to look entirely composed even at — Maya glanced at the clock on the hallway wall — two forty-seven in the morning.

In her hands she carried a small ceramic dish covered with aluminum foil.

"I made khichdi," Mrs. Patel said, as though this explained everything, because for Mrs. Patel it generally did. "I couldn't sleep. And when I can't sleep I cook, and when I cook at two in the morning there is always extra." She held the dish out. "You'll eat."

Maya stared at her.

"Also," Mrs. Patel continued, in the same unruffled tone, "there was a sound from your apartment, beta. A crying sound, I thought. Not loud. But I heard it through the wall." She tilted her head slightly, studying Maya's face with the particular attentiveness of a woman who had raised four children and could read distress the way other people read text. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

Maya opened her mouth. Closed it.

She thought about the nightmare. The hands at her throat, the initial warmth that had curdled into terror, the way she'd woken clawing at her own neck. She thought about whether she had made a sound, and realized she genuinely didn't know. She remembered the sensation of trying to scream and finding no air.

"I'm fine," she said. "I just…" She stopped. Tried again. "Bad dream."

Mrs. Patel's expression did not change, which meant she didn't believe this was the complete story but had decided not to press it. This was one of the things Maya had always appreciated about her neighbor. The woman had the emotional intelligence to know the difference between someone who needed to be pushed and someone who needed to be given a dish of khichdi and left to find their own way back to the surface.

"Come," Mrs. Patel said simply, nodding toward Maya's kitchen. "I'll heat it up. You look thin."

"I look the same as I always look."

"You look thin in the face," Mrs. Patel said, which was her way of saying you look like something is eating you from the inside without saying it directly. She moved past Maya into the apartment with the ease of long familiarity, heading for the kitchen without needing directions to it. She'd been in Maya's apartment enough times over the three years they'd been neighbors, for tea, for borrowed pantry items, for the occasional evening when loneliness made its way past both their defenses, to know the layout by heart.

Maya closed the door and followed.

She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Mrs. Patel move through the space, the older woman peeling back the foil on the ceramic dish and setting it in the microwave with practiced efficiency. The smell hit Maya first, warm and complex, the lentils and rice and ghee and the particular blend of spices Mrs. Patel used that Maya had never been able to exactly replicate despite having been given the recipe twice. Her stomach responded immediately and viscerally, a wave of hunger so sharp it was almost dizzying.

She pressed one hand to the doorframe.

The hunger had been like this for days now.