The woman's name, I would later find out, was not the name she gave me.
But that came later.
First there was Tuesday. A brutal, back-to-back, someone-please-put-me-out-of-my-misery Tuesday where I had a seven AM lab, a two PM lecture on pharmacological interventions that used the word contraindicated so many times it lost all meaning, and a four PM patient assessment that ran forty minutes over because the mannequin — the mannequin — had a calibration issue that my professor treated with the gravity of an actual medical emergency.
I got home at six-forty-seven. I know the exact time because I checked my phone in the elevator and thought: I have exactly enough energy to eat something, shower, and die peacefully in my bed.
I did not take the fourth floor elevator. I'd been taking the stairs every other time since Saturday night, rationing my fob use like it was a limited resource, which was irrational but felt right. Like if I went back too soon something would be different. Something would have shifted.
Or something would be waiting.
I took the stairs.
She was on the landing between three and four.
I almost missed her. She was standing against the wall in the way people stand when they don't want to be noticed — not hiding exactly, just occupying space quietly enough that your eye wanted to slide past. Small, maybe mid-forties, dark hair pulled back tight. She was wearing the kind of clothes that didn't belong to any particular style or decade, the deliberate anonymity of someone who had learned not to be memorable.
She was looking at the door to the fourth floor stairwell access.
Just looking at it.
I slowed without meaning to.
She turned. And something in her face went through several expressions very fast — surprise, assessment, decision — before settling into something careful and neutral.
"Sorry," I said automatically. "Didn't mean to startle you."
"You didn't." Her voice was low, accented faintly in a way I couldn't place. She looked at me for a moment. "You're on seven."
"Yeah." I shifted my bag strap. "704."
Something moved through her expression at that. Not quite recognition. More like confirmation, like I'd answered a question she'd already known the answer to.
"You've been on the floor," she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact.
I kept my face neutral, the way you learned to in clinical when a patient said something unexpected and you needed a second before responding. "I live here. I use the elevator."
"That's not what I mean."
We looked at each other in the stairwell. The fluorescent light above us buzzed faintly. From somewhere above, the building made one of its old-building noises, a low groan that could be pipes or could be something else entirely and I was trying very hard not to think about which.
She glanced toward the stairwell door. Then back at me. And then she moved — quick, deliberate — and her hand closed around my forearm.
Not hard. But firm. The grip of someone who needed to say something fast and needed me to stay still for it.
"He's good," she said. Low and fast, like the words had a limited window. "He tries. He keeps us safe, he does his job, I'm not — " She stopped. Steadied. "I'm not saying he isn't good."
"Okay," I said carefully.
"But he doesn't tell you everything." Her eyes were very direct. Dark, steady, the eyes of someone who had learned to look at things without flinching. "Nobody tells you everything here. There are things about this building — about that floor — that he knows and won't say and things he doesn't know and won't admit and you need to understand that before you go any further."
"Further," I repeated.
"With all of it." A beat. "With him."
The fluorescent light buzzed. My forearm was warm where her hand was.
"The door at the end of the hallway," I said quietly.
Her grip tightened. Just slightly. Just for a second.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't ask about it. Don't go near it. Don't let yourself get curious about it." Her voice had dropped even lower, the words coming out with a weight that wasn't fear exactly — it was past fear. The specific gravity of someone who had already been scared and come out the other side into something colder. "Curiosity is what it wants."
The word it landed somewhere in my chest and sat there.
"What is it?" I asked.
She let go of my arm.
Stepped back.
And just like that the window closed — I could see it in her face, the shutters coming down, the careful neutral expression returning.
"I've said enough," she said.
"You've said almost nothing—"
"I've said enough." She looked at me one more time, and there was something in it — not a warning, not quite. More like an apology. Like she was sorry for what I didn't know yet and sorrier for what I was going to find out. "Be careful with him. He means well. But the floor takes things from people." A pause. "It's already taken things from him that he doesn't know are gone."
Then she pushed open the stairwell door to the fourth floor landing and walked through it.
The door swung shut behind her.
I stood on the landing between three and four for a long moment, bag on my shoulder, heart doing something complicated, the buzz of the fluorescent light the only sound in the world.
Curiosity is what it wants.
It's already taken things from him that he doesn't know are gone.
I took the rest of the stairs slowly.
✦
I ate dinner without tasting it.
Showered. Put on the oversized shirt. Sat on my bed with my nursing notes open on my lap and stared at them for twenty minutes without reading a single word.
My phone was in my hand before I'd made a conscious decision.
Then I put it back down.
Then I picked it up again.
I typed: can I ask you something
Sent it before I could think about it.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Luca: ask
Me: the woman on the fourth floor. the one who's been there the longest. does she ever leave the building
A longer pause this time. I watched the three dots appear and disappear twice.
Luca: why
Me: I saw her today. in the stairwell
The three dots stopped. No response for a full minute. I counted.
Then: I'll come to you
Me: Luca it's fine you don't have to—
Luca: ten minutes
I set my phone down and looked at my apartment. Takeout container still on the counter. Notes spread across my bed. Hair still damp. Me in my running shirt that said FINISH STRONG and plaid shorts that had survived four apartments and had no business being seen by anyone.
I looked at the door.
"Great," I said to no one.
✦
He knocked eight minutes later.
I opened the door and he was in the hoodie again — dark, sleeves pushed to his elbows in a way that was doing nothing to help me think clearly — and he looked different than he had in his apartment on Saturday. The composure was still there but it was sitting differently on him, like a coat he'd put on slightly crooked and hadn't noticed.
He looked at my shirt. Then at my face.
"FINISH STRONG," he read.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were making a face."
"I don't make faces."
"Luca, you make very small, extremely controlled faces and I have been studying them for a week." I stepped back from the door. "Come in."
He came in. Looked around my apartment the same way I'd looked around his — taking inventory, I realized, cataloguing. The stacked nursing manuals. The half-finished mug on the coffee table. The framed print on the wall that I'd straightened twice now and that kept tilting slightly to the left for no reason I'd been able to identify.
His eyes stopped on the print for just a second.
Then moved on.
"Sit down," I said.
"I'm okay standing."
I looked at him. He looked at me. The corner of his mouth moved — barely.
"Touché," he said, and sat on the couch.
I sat on the other end. Pulled my knees up. Looked at him directly. "What did she say?"
"I was going to ask you that."
"I asked first."
He was quiet for a moment, forearms on his knees, hands loosely linked. In my apartment's warmer light I could see things I hadn't noticed in the hallway — the faint shadows under his eyes that said he slept less than he should. The way his jaw held a tension that probably never fully left. The scar above his brow that I kept professionally noticing and personally couldn't stop looking at.
"She's been on the floor for four months," he said. "Longest current resident. She's — cautious. Doesn't trust easily." He paused. "What she told you about the floor, about me — she's not wrong. I don't tell residents everything. I don't tell anyone everything. That's the nature of how this works."
"She said it's already taken things from you that you don't know are gone."
The silence that followed was very specific. The kind that meant I'd landed somewhere real.
"She said that," he said. Not a question.
"Word for word."
He looked at his hands. Something moved through his expression that he didn't manage to keep off his face — something tired, and old, and in the particular shape of a thing a person had stopped arguing with.
"She's not wrong about that either," he said quietly.
I wanted to ask what. I wanted to ask what it had taken, what was gone, whether he knew it was happening or whether it was slow enough that he'd never noticed the edges getting soft. I wanted to ask about the door and the pacing shadow and the cold certainty of being known by something in the dark.
I didn't ask any of it.
Because something about the way he was sitting — the weight of him, the tiredness he was letting me see right now, just barely, just this much — made me understand that there was an order to things. That he'd given me rules for the floor and this was its own version of that. There were doors I could walk up to and there were doors I had to wait to be let through.
I was learning which was which.
"Okay," I said instead.
He looked up. "That's it?"
"For now."
He studied me with that considering look. "Most people push harder."
"Most people aren't paying close enough attention to know when not to." I pulled my knees closer. "I'm not going anywhere, Luca. I'm three doors down. We have time."
Something shifted in his expression. Slow, like a tide. Something almost unbearably careful.
"You should get some sleep," he said. His voice had gone quieter. "You look like your week tried to kill you."
"Accurate." I didn't move. "She's okay, right? The woman. She's safe up there."
"Yes."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure."
I nodded. Believed him. Filed away the fraction of uncertainty in my own chest for later examination.
He stood. And I stood too, and we were briefly, suddenly closer than we'd been in his apartment — just the geography of a small couch and two people both moving at once, a foot of space between us, close enough that I could confirm the rain-and-something-else scent from the very first night wasn't the building. It was him. Faint, clean, and underneath it something cooler that I couldn't name.
Neither of us stepped back.
"Thank you for coming," I said. Quietly.
"Thank you for telling me." He looked at me for a moment in a way that had stopped feeling like evaluation and started feeling like something else entirely. "Lock your door tonight."
"I always lock my door."
"The deadbolt," he said. "Not just the handle."
I searched his face. "Is something—"
"Precaution." He said it evenly. "It's been a strange week on the floor. Nothing specific. Just—" He stopped. "Precaution."
Strange week.
I thought about the print that kept tilting. The wall that had been cold behind it. The light under the door and the shadow that already knew I was there.
"Okay," I said.
He nodded. Moved to the door. Opened it.
"Luca." He stopped, half-turned. I looked at him across the small space of my apartment, in my ridiculous shirt, in the warm light, with the fob on my bedside table and a head full of things I wasn't saying yet. "What did the floor take from you?"
The question landed.
He stood with it for a moment. Not deflecting, not closing off. Just holding it, like he was actually considering the answer, actually looking for it somewhere.
"I used to be able to leave," he said finally.
Then he left.
The door clicked shut behind him.
I stood in my apartment and let that settle — the weight of it, the specific shape of what it meant. A man who managed a floor he hadn't chosen, honoring a deal he hadn't made, six years into something that had quietly, incrementally taken from him the ability to walk away.
I locked the door.
The deadbolt.
Then I went to the print on the wall and straightened it for the third time and pressed my palm flat against the wall behind it.
Cold.
Not cool. Cold.
Like something on the other side pressing back.
I left my hand there for a moment.
Then I went to bed.
Didn't sleep for a long time.
And somewhere below me, patient and unhurried and very, very awake—
Three knocks.
Slow.
Then nothing.