Maintenance said three days.Three days to fix the pipe, treat the damp, assess the flooring, do whatever it was they needed to do before the apartment was liveable again. Olivia stood in her doorway on Monday morning and looked at the state of it — the warped floorboards, the smell of wet plaster, the towels she’d laid down now stiff and useless — and called her insurance company and then her sister and then Jade in Edinburgh and then stood in the hallway and accepted, quietly, that she had no real alternative.She knocked on his door.He opened it already knowing, she could tell. He had that look — not smug exactly, just settled, like the situation had resolved itself in a direction he’d already anticipated.“Three days,” she said.“Okay,” he said, and stepped aside to let her in.That was it. No negotiation, no conditions, no conversation about boundaries or arrangements or what this was. Just — okay, come in. Like it was simple. She found that both reassuring and faintly alarming.
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