Chapter 4 – Lies he tells. Excuses she makes.

By the end of the first week, time stops behaving like time.

It stretches in the afternoons, thin and brittle, every hour a separate decision. Then it snaps forward without warning and suddenly it's night again and Maya is lying next to Dex, counting his breaths like they might run out.

Today is an afternoon day.

Dex leaves just after midday.

"I'll be quick," he says, already halfway down the ladder, already not looking at her properly.

"Where?"

"Just around. Found a place yesterday — might have supplies."

Maybe is doing a lot of work there. Maya watches it strain under the weight.

She could ask more. She could say, Take me with you. She could say, Show me where. She could say, Stop disappearing like the walls aren't already thin enough.

"Don't push it," she says instead.

Dex smiles, quick and easy, like this is normal. "I won't."

He leaves. The door closes. The warehouse inhales his absence and settles into it like a body finding a familiar bruise.

Emotional truth: she misses him the second he's gone.

Deflection: great, now she's emotionally dependent on a man who can't reliably locate a mop handle.

Sharper truth: she doesn't miss him. She misses who he was when missing him didn't feel like a risk calculation.

She stands. Works. Because work has edges. Because work is something she can finish, or at least pretend to.

She checks the barricade. The water. The roof. The food. Always the food. Six tins. Five and a half protein bars. The crate sits there, neutral, unbothered, as if it hasn't become the central character in her personal psychological drama.

She leans back against the desk and lets herself sit.

Thinks about before. Not the big things. The small, stupid ones.

Dex in the kitchen, arguing with a recipe like it personally offended him. Two cloves of garlic is not enough garlic. That's a suggestion. That's garlic for cowards.

Her on the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, not really working. Somewhere, an Italian grandmother just felt that and doesn't know why.

He'd grinned. I cook with feeling.

You cook with fear of seasoning.

He'd thrown a dish towel at her. She'd kept it.

The memory lands softly. Then shifts. Because now she can see the edges of it — the parts she didn't examine then. He cooked when it was fun. When it was optional. When there was applause at the end.

He never cleaned the pan.

Maya opens her eyes.

She laughs under her breath. "Great timing," she says to the empty room. "Love that for me."

***

The knock comes just before dark. Two taps. Then one. Their pattern.

She lets him in.

He looks better today. Cleaner. Less frantic. A confidence in the way he moves, like he's been somewhere that made sense, even briefly.

"Found a place," he says. "Storage unit. Mostly cleared out, but still some things."

He holds up a small bag. Two cans. A packet of crackers. A chocolate bar, already opened.

Maya looks at it. Then at him. "Nice," she says.

He smiles, relieved again. Always relieved when she doesn't ask the next question. "Yeah. Lucky."

Then he steps closer. Too close, too quickly. His hand finds her waist. Familiar. Automatic.

Maya lets it.

Emotional truth: she wants to feel something solid again.

Deflection: excellent, nothing says emotional stability like clinging to a man who smells like vending machine regret.

Sharper truth: this is happening because it used to mean something, and neither of them knows what to replace it with.

He kisses her. Soft. Practiced. The exact pressure he knows she used to lean into. Maya responds. Of course she does. She knows the rhythm. The angle. The version of herself that fits here.

He exhales against her mouth, something loosening in him, like this is proof that things are still okay.

That's when she notices the smell. Sweet. Artificial. Strawberry again, or maybe cherry. Something bright and wrong under the sweat and dust. Her brain files it quietly while her body keeps going, because apparently she can multitask betrayal now.

After, he presses his forehead to hers, smiling a little, softer now.

"God," he murmurs. "I needed that."

Maya nods. Of course he did.

***

They eat. He talks — about routes, about the quiet, about how strange it is, everything just stopping. Maya listens. Nods in the right places. Laughs once, softly, when he makes a joke about looting feeling like shopping with consequences.

She watches herself do it. That's the strangest part. Not the lying. Not the missing food. Not even the slow creeping certainty that something between them has shifted and is not shifting back.

It's the performance. The way she hits every mark. The right tone. The right expression. The version of herself that makes this still work, at least on the surface.

She didn't know she had that in her. Or maybe she did. Maybe this is just what loving someone looks like when it starts to hurt in a new way.

Later, on the mezzanine, he presses a quick kiss to her forehead.

"I'm glad I've got you," he murmurs.

Maya closes her eyes.

In another week, that would have filled her up. Now it lands and slides.

"I know," she says.

He falls asleep quickly. He always has.

Maya stares at the ceiling. She catalogues. Not supplies. Not exits. Not threats.

Them.

The way he used to look at her like she was the answer, not the infrastructure.

She adds one more thing to the list.

The way even this didn't fix it.ems civilisation once considered worth transporting across cities.

Now it stores Maya, Dex, twelve bottles of water, seven tins of food, one crowbar, and a level of tension that should technically require its own shelf.

"Homey," Dex says, looking around.

Maya shines her flashlight over the cracked concrete floor. "Yes. Very industrial chic. All it needs is a rug and fewer ways to die."

They found the place after leaving the community centre at dawn, when the dead gathered too thick near the front entrance and the back alley started making noises an alley should never make unless it has swallowed a marching band. Maya picked it for sightlines, storage racks, and a flat roof with internal access. Dex picked it because there were no corpses in the first room. Both are valid selection criteria. Hers just came with fewer surprise endings.

She spends the day working. Not heroically. Not beautifully. Survival is not beautiful. Survival is stacking pallets against a loading bay until your shoulders scream, then checking whether the bathroom tap still works, then filling plastic storage bins with water because apparently bucket has become a luxury category.

Dex helps. Mostly when she is looking.

When she hands him boards, he carries boards. When she points at a gap under the side door, he wedges cardboard into it and says, "Like this?"

"Wood would be better."

He goes to find wood and comes back with a mop handle.

Maya looks at it.

Dex lifts one shoulder. "It was wood-adjacent."

She laughs, because the alternative is screaming into a shelving unit until it apologises.

He can make her laugh. That's real. He remembers stupid details too, like how she hates canned peas but will eat them if mixed with enough hot sauce to qualify as a workplace hazard. He once drove forty minutes to bring her a phone charger because she texted I may die at 3% and he replied Not on my watch, like a man entering battle with Apple compatibility issues.

She loves him. She sees him. Those two things are beginning to feel less like twins and more like opposing legal teams.

By late afternoon, Maya has a system. Water near the rear wall, shaded and covered. Food in a plastic crate under the metal office desk, portioned by day. Tools by the roof access. Sleeping area on the mezzanine, because height matters, and also because if she is eaten on the ground floor after all this effort, she will be furious in whatever afterlife accepts women with poor sleep and excellent knife discipline.

Dex watches her tape a hand-drawn map beside the office door.

"You really think of everything," he says.

It sounds admiring. It is admiring. It also sounds like an invitation to keep thinking of everything so he doesn't have to.

"Somebody has to," Maya says.

He doesn't answer. For a second she wants him to argue, to say I'm here too, to be offended enough to become useful. Instead he sits on an overturned crate and rubs his face. "I'm exhausted."

Maya looks at the barricade she built, the water she hauled, the food she counted, the exits she checked, the roof she cleared, the mental list still breeding in her skull like anxious rabbits.

"Same," she says. It comes out almost kind.

***

Near dusk, she sees the woman.

Maya is on the roof with binoculars from the security drawer—the universe occasionally throws her a bone, then labels it probably cursed—scanning the street below.

The woman moves between two houses across the road. Alone. Backpack. Hammer. Hair tied up. No wasted motion. She pauses near a parked car, checks underneath it first, then inside, then the reflection in the window behind her.

Competent, Maya thinks. The word hits harder than it should.

Dex comes up behind her, breathing loud enough to alert three counties. "What is it?"

"Survivor."

"Should we call out?"

"No."

The woman turns then, as if she feels the weight of Maya's attention. For one strange second, they look at each other across the ruined street. Maya lifts one hand. Small. The woman hesitates, then lifts hers back. No smile. No invitation. No rescue fantasy. Just acknowledgement. Then she moves on.

"Guess she didn't want company," Dex says.

Maya watches her disappear behind a row of burned-out cars. There is a feeling in her chest. Not loneliness. Not exactly. Envy is an ugly word, so she doesn't use it.

"Guess not," she says.

***

That night, after Dex falls asleep too quickly, Maya checks the supplies.

She tells herself it's routine. Routine is a lovely word for mistrust wearing a clipboard.

Seven tins should be seven tins.

Six look back at her with the blank, smug faces of canned goods who know damn well they've been involved in something. One protein bar missing too.

She closes the crate. Returns it exactly as it was. Climbs the ladder. Lies down beside the man she loves. Stares into the dark until morning begins thinking about arriving.

She says nothing.

The counting does not stop.