Bea found the bar on TikTok, which should have been a warning.
"It has exposed brick," she said, like that settled it. "And they do a passion fruit martini that someone in the comments described as life-changing."
"That's a low bar for life-changing."
"Aria. Exposed brick. Passion fruit. You've been living in your haunted apartment for three weeks and you haven't let me visit once. Get dressed."
"It's not haunted."
"You took the stairs for four days straight because the elevator scared you."
"That was a personal choice—"
"GET DRESSED."
I got dressed.
✦
The bar was called Maren's and it was exactly what Bea's TikTok algorithm thought she deserved — warm low lighting, exposed brick as promised, a playlist that walked the line between background and actually good. It was a Wednesday which meant it was busy without being suffocating, the specific mid-week energy of people who had decided they'd earned something.
Bea was already there when I arrived, at a corner table, two menus open in front of her, wearing a yellow dress that had no business looking that good on a Wednesday and radiating the energy of someone who had been waiting to interrogate me for three weeks and had prepared.
She stood up and hugged me hard.
"You look tired," she said.
"Thank you, Bea."
"And kind of — " She held me at arm's length and looked at my face with the scrutiny of someone who had known me since we were seventeen and shared a terrible dorm room. "Activated. You look activated."
"That's not a thing."
"It's absolutely a thing. Sit down. I ordered us the martinis. Tell me everything."
"There's nothing to tell."
She stared at me.
"There's some things," I said.
"Obviously. Sit."
✦
The martinis arrived and they were, genuinely, extremely good. I made a mental note to tell whoever wrote that TikTok comment that they had set appropriate expectations for once.
"Okay," Bea said, folding her arms on the table, leaning in. She had the specific posture of a woman settling in for information. "Start from the beginning. Elevator boy. Go."
"His name is Luca."
"I know his name, I've been living with his name in my head for three weeks. What does he look like."
"That's not the important part—"
"Aria. What does he look like."
I picked up my martini. "Tall. Dark hoodie, always. Messy hair. Sharp face. Scar above his left eyebrow."
Bea pressed her hands flat on the table. "The scar. Above the eyebrow. Okay. Okay, I'm fine. Keep going."
"He's got this thing where he doesn't really answer questions directly. Like you ask him something and he says just enough that you feel like you got an answer but then you realize later that you didn't."
"Manipulative."
"No, it's — no. It's not like that. It's more like—" I turned my glass. "Like he's measured about everything. Like every word gets weighed before it comes out. Like he's used to information being valuable and he doesn't give it away carelessly."
Bea looked at me for a moment. "You've thought about this a lot."
"I live three doors down from him, I have nothing else to—"
"You've thought about him a lot."
"Bea."
"I'm just noting it. Clinically. As your best friend." She sipped her martini. "Has anything happened?"
"Define happened."
She gave me a look.
"Nothing has happened," I said. "We've talked. In the hallway, the lobby. He came to my apartment once."
Bea sat up straighter. "He came to your apartment."
"It was about the building. There's a — situation. With the building."
"What kind of situation."
I looked at her. And I thought about Luca's rules — what you know about this floor doesn't leave the building. I thought about the woman in the stairwell, about three missing people, about a door that locked from the outside and a shadow that paced and an elevator that opened itself at seven in the morning.
I thought about what it would sound like out loud, here, in a warm bar with good martinis and exposed brick and a TikTok playlist, said to someone who had no context and no fob and no cold wall behind a crooked print.
"Building stuff," I said. "Old wiring. Weird elevator. You know."
Bea narrowed her eyes. "That's not the whole story."
"It's enough of the story for tonight."
She studied me for a long moment. I held her gaze and drank my martini and tried to look like a person with nothing on her mind.
"Fine," she said. "But I want the rest of it eventually."
"Eventually," I agreed.
She pointed at me. "Back to Luca. His apartment. What happened."
"He gave me something." I paused. "A key. Sort of. To a shared area of the building. He's involved in building management."
"He gave you a key."
"Sort of a key."
"To a shared area."
"Yes."
"And when he gave it to you — "
"Bea—"
"Did your fingers touch?"
I said nothing.
Bea made a sound that turned heads at the next table.
"For half a second," I said. "It wasn't — it was nothing. It was accidental contact during a key handoff, it happens—"
"Your face right now—"
"My face is normal—"
"Aria, you're the color of this brick wall—"
"I am not—"
"You like him." She said it with the triumphant certainty of someone who had been right about something for weeks. "You actually, genuinely like him and it's driving you insane because he's all mysterious and guarded and you can't figure him out and you're a person who figures things out and it's killing you."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
Picked up my martini.
"The passion fruit in this is really good," I said.
Bea screamed quietly into her hands.
✦
We stayed for three hours.
Two martinis each, then we switched to wine because Bea said martinis were for the first act and wine was for the part of the night where you said things you actually meant. She wasn't wrong. She ordered us a cheese board that arrived looking like an art installation and we ate all of it while she told me about her own disasters — a situationship that had finally, mercifully collapsed under its own weight, a work project that had tried to consume her entire personality for a month, her upstairs neighbor who apparently moved furniture at two AM with the enthusiasm of someone training for a furniture-moving competition.
"At least your building drama is interesting," she said, refilling her glass. "Mine is just some guy rearranging his bedroom at midnight for reasons I cannot fathom."
"Grass is always greener."
"Your grass has a mysterious man in it."
"My grass also has — " I stopped. "Other things."
"The building stuff."
"Yeah."
She looked at me over her glass. The bar had gotten louder, the Wednesday crowd warming up, and in the warm noise of it Bea's face was lit soft and familiar and I felt, suddenly, the specific weight of what I'd been carrying for three weeks. Not heavy exactly. More like — dense. Compact. The kind of thing you didn't notice pressing on you until you were somewhere it wasn't.
"Are you okay?" she asked. Quiet, underneath the noise. Just for me.
I thought about it. Actually thought about it instead of deflecting.
"I think so," I said. "It's just — a lot. The building, and him, and school, and trying to figure out what I'm—" I gestured vaguely. "What I'm in the middle of."
"Do you feel safe?"
I looked at her. "Yeah. I do." And I meant it, which was interesting, because by any rational metric I should not have. "He makes me feel safe. Which is stupid because he's also the source of most of the—"
"That's not stupid," Bea said. "That's just what it's like when someone gets under your skin." She leaned her chin on her hand. "The feeling safe thing. That's not nothing, Aria. That's actually kind of everything."
I turned my wine glass.
Thought about the way he'd stepped between me and the elevator without thinking. The way he'd said safe like it cost him something. The way he'd sat on my couch in my apartment and let me see the tiredness he didn't show anyone else, just for a few minutes, just that much.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I know."
Bea smiled at me. The real one, the soft one she saved for moments like this. "I want to meet him."
"Absolutely not."
"Why?"
"Because you'll say something."
"I'll be completely professional."
"Bea, you screamed into your hands ten minutes ago."
"That was a private scream. I'm capable of public composure." She raised her glass. "To your mysterious neighbor. May he eventually answer a question directly."
I laughed — a real one, the kind that came from somewhere loose and warm. "To that," I said.
We clinked glasses.
✦
She walked me to the subway at ten thirty, arm through mine, talking about nothing and everything the way we had since we were seventeen, the comfortable ramble of a friendship that had survived enough that it didn't need to perform anymore.
At the top of the stairs she hugged me again. Long, warm, the specific hug of a person who had been worried and was relieved and was expressing both of those things through pressure.
"Call me," she said. "Actual calls. Not just texts."
"I call you."
"You text. There's a difference." She pulled back and held me by the shoulders and looked at me seriously. "And if anything actually scary happens—"
"I'll call."
"Promise."
"I promise, Bea."
She looked at me for a second longer. Like she was checking something. Then she nodded, apparently satisfied, and let go.
"Go home," she said. "Sleep. You look like your brain needs a full restart."
"Rude."
"Accurate. Love you."
"Love you."
She headed off down the street, yellow dress visible for half a block before the crowd swallowed her.
I stood at the top of the subway stairs and breathed the night air — cold and clean, the city doing its city thing, indifferent and alive and completely ordinary.
For three hours I'd been a normal person doing normal things. Martinis and cheese boards and best friends and the comfortable warmth of being known by someone. No floors that didn't exist. No shadows under doors. No elevators that opened themselves.
Just Aria. Just Wednesday. Just the night.
I went down the stairs.
✦
My phone buzzed on the subway.
I looked at it expecting Bea — a follow-up thought, a voice memo, a string of emojis that somehow communicated an entire paragraph.
It was Luca.
One message. No preamble.
What time are you getting back.
I looked at it for a moment. The subway rattled around me, strangers in their own worlds, the specific anonymous intimacy of public transit at night.
I typed back: why
Three dots. Then:
Just asking.
I smiled at my phone in a way that I was deeply grateful no one who knew me could see.
Me: twenty minutes probably. why, you need something?
Luca: no
Luca: just asking
I stared at those two messages.
The subway rattled.
I bit my lip.
Me: okay
A pause. Then:
Luca: good
That was it. Just — good. The most nothing word in the world, landing in my chest like something significant.
I put my phone in my pocket and looked at the dark window across from me, my own reflection looking back, and I thought about what Bea had said. The feeling safe thing. That's not nothing. That's actually kind of everything.
And then my phone buzzed again.
I pulled it out.
Unknown number.
Not Luca's contact. A different number entirely. One I didn't recognize.
One message.
you should not have gone out tonight
I stared at it.
The subway rattled and screeched around a corner.
I typed back: who is this
Nothing. No three dots. No response.
I checked the number. No match in my contacts. No area code I recognized.
I looked around the subway car. Strangers. Phones and headphones and tired faces. Nobody looking at me. Nobody paying attention.
I typed to Luca: did you just text me from a different number
Luca: no. why
I looked at the unknown number's message again.
you should not have gone out tonight.
The subway pulled into my stop.
I got off.
Walked the three blocks to Creston Residences fast, not quite running, the night that had felt clean and ordinary twenty minutes ago now sitting differently around me — the shadows between streetlights a little deeper, the sounds of the city a little less indifferent.
I pushed through the building door.
The lobby was quiet. Empty. The coffee machine dark.
The elevator was waiting. Doors open. Like it had been expecting me.
Panel lit up normally. Floors one through twelve. No anomalies.
I stood in the lobby and looked at it.
Then I took it. Straight to seven, no stops, doors opening onto my floor, carpet and fluorescent light and the familiar ordinary of the hallway I lived in.
I walked to my apartment.
Unlocked the door. The handle. The deadbolt.
Went inside.
Turned on every light.
Stood in the middle of my apartment and breathed.
My print was on the wall. Straight. I hadn't straightened it before I left — I'd left it tilted, deliberately, as a kind of marker — and it was straight now.
Someone had straightened it.
My phone buzzed.
Luca: Aria.
Me: yeah
Luca: you're back?
Me: just walked in
Luca: good
A pause.
Luca: lock the deadbolt
Me: already done. Luca — my print is straight. I left it tilted.
A longer pause this time.
Luca: I know
Me: you know?
Luca: I'll explain tomorrow
I looked at the print. Straight and neat on the wall like nothing had ever been wrong with it.
Me: did you come into my apartment
Luca: no
I stood in my lit-up apartment and felt the cold gathering in the corner by the window, the same cold that came every night, patient and consistent and mine now in the way that things became yours when you stopped being able to pretend they weren't there.
Me: then who did
No response for a full minute.
Then:
Luca: get some sleep. I'll explain tomorrow. Don't open the door for anyone tonight.
Me: that's not reassuring
Luca: I know. I'm sorry.
I stared at that last message for a long time.
Luca didn't apologize. In all the weeks of careful words and measured answers and almost-smiles, I had never once heard him apologize for anything.
I know. I'm sorry.
I put my phone on the bedside table.
Next to the fob.
Which was exactly where I'd left it.
Facing the right way.
I turned off the lights except the one by my bed.
Lay down.
Stared at the ceiling.
My heart was going again — that same complicated rate from the night he'd handed me the fob, the same two reasons tangled together, except tonight the ratio had shifted. Tonight the cold corner was louder than it had been. Tonight an unknown number had told me I shouldn't have gone out. Tonight my print had been straightened by hands that weren't mine and weren't his.
But also.
Just asking.
Good.
I know. I'm sorry.
I closed my eyes.
The building breathed around me.
I breathed back.
And somewhere below, patient as ever—
Nothing.
Silence.
Which was somehow worse than the knocking.
Because the knocking meant it was there and contained.
Silence meant it was somewhere else.