Chapter Four: Black, No Sugar

I woke up at 5 a.m. and didn't know where I was.

That lasted about four seconds, the ceiling was too high, the sheets too soft, the silence too complete and then yesterday came back in full, the way a wave comes back after it recedes. Quiet and then all at once.

I lay there for a while. Watching the room get light.

The windows in my room faced east, which I hadn't noticed the night before, and the sunrise came in slowly — pale grey first, then a thin gold that moved across the floor like it was being careful not to wake anyone. It was the kind of morning that would have been beautiful if I'd been in any condition to appreciate it properly.

I wasn't.

I got up, showered, dressed. Old habit keep moving, don't let the morning get heavy. I'd learned it young, in houses that weren't mine, in rooms I knew I'd eventually leave. You make the bed. You get dressed. You give the day something to work with.

By six-thirty I was restless enough to do something about it.

I found the kitchen after two wrong turns ; one into what appeared to be a study, one into a room that was entirely empty for reasons I couldn't explain. The kitchen was large and very clean and equipped with the kind of appliances that have too many buttons and no visible instructions. I stood in front of the coffee machine for a full minute before I found something I recognised.

I made coffee. Then, because my hands needed something to do, I made toast. Then, because the fruit bowl on the counter looked deliberately ornamental and slightly sad, I cut up a mango that looked like it had been waiting for someone to notice it.

I ate standing at the kitchen counter, looking out at the city coming awake below.

It was, I thought, a very strange life I had agreed to.

At seven I heard him.

Not loud, Damien Cole was not a loud person. Just the particular quiet of someone else moving through a space. Footsteps in the hallway. A door. Then nothing.

I rinsed my cup. Considered going back to my room. Decided against it I lived here now, technically, and I wasn't going to spend six months retreating every time I heard him coming.

But he didn't come into the kitchen.

I waited, which I told myself I wasn't doing, and he didn't appear, and eventually curiosity won over pride and I opened the kitchen door into the hallway.

There was a cup of coffee outside my bedroom door.

Just sitting there. On the floor. Still steaming slightly, which meant he'd made it recently, which meant he'd walked past the kitchen while I was in it and said absolutely nothing and gone to make me coffee anyway.

I stared at it for a long moment.

Black. No sugar. Which was exactly how I had mine.

I hadn't told him that. I was certain I hadn't told him that. I thought back over the last twenty four hours and there was no moment I could identify where coffee preferences had come up. Which meant he had simply noticed. At some point. Somehow.

I picked up the cup and went back into my room and sat on the bed.

Drank it slowly.

It was perfect.

I was in considerably more trouble than I'd previously calculated.

I didn't mention the coffee at breakfast.

He was already at the table when I came out dressed for the office, reading something, a cup of his own in front of him. He looked up briefly. I sat down. Gloria appeared with toast and eggs and the comfortable efficiency of someone who had learned not to read rooms she wasn't invited to read.

We ate. We didn't talk much. But it was a different silence than last night; less careful, slightly warmer, like a room that's been aired out.

At one point I reached across the table for the orange juice at the same moment he did and our hands almost touched and we both pulled back and said nothing.

"I rearranged the spice rack," I said eventually.

He looked up.

"In the kitchen," I added. "It was alphabetical, which doesn't make any functional sense when you're actually cooking. I grouped them by use instead. Savoury, sweet, heat." A pause. "I can put it back."

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved at the corner of his mouth not quite a smile, but the suggestion of one.

"Leave it," he said, and went back to his reading.

I looked down at my plate.

Leave it.

Two words. I replayed them more times than was reasonable on my walk back to my room.

That was the morning of day three. And the spice rack stayed exactly the way I'd left it.

I checked