I was almost asleep.
Not fully — that specific suspended state where your thoughts stop making linear sense and start doing their own thing, images and half-sentences drifting loose from whatever anchored them. I was somewhere between the passion fruit martini and the cold corner and Luca's *I know, I'm sorry* when the knock came.
Three beats. Even. Deliberate.
I knew his knock by now. That was a thing that had happened apparently — I had learned the specific rhythm of how Luca's knuckles met my door and could identify it in a half-conscious state at two in the morning which was information about myself I was going to examine later.
I checked my phone. 2:07 AM.
I lay there for a second.
He knocked again. Same rhythm. Slightly more urgent.
I got up.
I was wearing the 5K shirt again and the plaid shorts because I had not remotely prepared for two AM visitors and frankly if he was going to show up at this hour he got what he got. I unlocked the deadbolt, the handle, and opened the door.
Luca looked—
Not good.
Still put together in the technical sense — hoodie, dark jeans, hair pushed back like he'd been running his hands through it. But the composure was sitting wrong on him, the same way it had in the lobby when I'd told him what the woman said, except more. Like something had knocked it sideways and he hadn't had time to straighten it.
He looked at me. Then at my hair, which was doing something architectural from being half-asleep on it.
"Hi," I said.
"Did I wake you?"
"I was almost asleep. It's two AM, Luca."
"I know. I'm—" He stopped. Looked at me more carefully. Something shifted in his expression. "Are you — how many drinks did you have tonight?"
I drew myself up to my full height, which was not as impressive as I needed it to be in this moment. "I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
"Two martinis and some wine. I'm not drunk, I'm just—" I made a vague gesture. "Slightly warm. It's been wearing off for an hour. I'm fine."
He looked at me for a moment in the specific way of someone deciding whether fine was accurate.
"She's gone," he said.
The warmth dropped.
"The woman from the stairwell," I said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Gone as in—"
"Gone as in her unit is empty. Bed made, belongings cleared, no note, no message, nothing on her phone." His jaw was tight. "The elevator log shows she accessed the fourth floor at eleven forty PM and didn't come back through."
"The elevator log." I blinked. "You have an elevator log."
"I have a log for every access point on the floor. She went up and didn't come down." A pause. "I've checked everywhere. She's not in the building."
I stood in my doorway and processed that. The woman with the dark hair and the careful eyes who had grabbed my arm in the stairwell and said *he's good, he tries.* Who had known things about the door that Luca had never told her. Who had been here four months, the longest current resident, long enough that he'd been planning to move her on.
The longer they stay the less they want to leave.
"You think she went to the door," I said.
"I think she went to the door."
"Luca—"
"I can't go in after her." He said it flat and immediate, like it wasn't a decision he was making right now but one he'd made a long time ago and was just reporting. "If I go through that door I'm not — I can't manage the floor from inside it. The other residents, the operation, everything falls apart. I can't."
I looked at him. "So what do you need from me?"
He held my gaze. And underneath the control, underneath the managed composure and the tight jaw and the six years of careful everything — he looked exhausted. Genuinely, deeply exhausted in the way people looked when they'd been holding something heavy alone for too long.
"I need someone to help me check the floor," he said. "Every unit, the hallway, the access points. I need another set of eyes and I need someone who—" He stopped.
"Who what?"
"Who won't panic," he said. "Someone who can look at something alarming and stay functional."
I looked at him for a long moment.
"You want me to come to the fourth floor at two in the morning," I said.
"Yes."
"Because you think a woman who's been here four months just walked into the door that ate three people."
"Yes."
"And you need a slightly tipsy nursing student to help you look."
Something moved across his face. Almost a smile, except the circumstances murdered it before it arrived. "You said you were fine."
"I am fine. I'm also slightly warm. Both things are true." I looked at him. "Give me ten seconds."
I left the door open and went to my bedside table. Grabbed the fob. Pulled on the hoodie that was hanging on the back of my desk chair — oversized, soft, the one I wore when I needed to feel like I had armor on. Stepped into my sneakers.
Grabbed my phone.
Came back to the door.
Luca looked at my hoodie. Then at my shorts. Then at my sneakers.
"Don't," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were making a face."
"I don't make—"
"Luca." I stepped out into the hallway and pulled my door shut behind me. "Let's go."
✦
The fourth floor at two in the morning was different from every other time I'd been there.
The flickering was slower. Deeper, somehow — the lights dropping almost to nothing before catching themselves, the hallway existing in long blinks of near-dark. The draft was stronger, moving against us as the elevator doors opened, cold enough that I was grateful for the hoodie.
Luca stepped out first.
I followed.
The hallway was empty and quiet. Three doors on the left, keypads dark. At the far end — the door. Deadbolted. Still.
"Start at the first unit," Luca said quietly. His voice was different up here. Lower, more careful. Like the floor had its own register and he'd learned to match it. "I need to check she's not — that she didn't go to one of the other residents."
"Do they know each other?"
"Minimally. I discourage it." He moved to the first door, pressed his key to the pad. "If she said something to one of them—"
"You want to know what she said before you figure out what to do next."
"Yes."
The door opened. He knocked on the frame — soft, even. "Lucas." A different name to the one I knew, I registered distantly. A name for the floor. "It's me. I need a moment."
A pause. Then movement inside. The door opened wider.
The man was maybe thirty, dark circles, the look of someone who had been awake anyway. He looked at Luca, then at me, with the particular expression of fourth floor residents when they encountered something unexpected — careful, assessing, giving nothing away.
"She's with me," Luca said. "She's trusted."
The man looked at me for another second. Then nodded.
"Did Mara come to you tonight?" Luca asked.
So that was her name. Or the name she used here.
The man shook his head. "Haven't seen her since yesterday morning. Elevator?"
"Possibly."
Something moved through the man's expression. Not surprise. The specific not-surprise of someone who had been quietly expecting this. "She'd been standing at the end of the hallway a lot lately," he said. "Just standing there. Looking at it."
"How long?"
"Week, maybe. Week and a half." He paused. "I told her not to. She said she already knew what I was going to say."
Luca was quiet for a moment. "Okay. Thank you. Lock your door and don't open it again tonight."
The man nodded. Looked at me one more time. "You're the one from seven," he said.
"Yeah."
"She talked about you." He said it simply, without explanation.
The door closed.
I looked at Luca.
"She talked about me," I said quietly.
"Later," he said. "Come on."
✦
The second unit was empty — resident on a scheduled temporary exit, Luca told me in a low voice. The third unit's resident, a young woman who opened the door with the chain on and looked through the gap with enormous careful eyes, said she hadn't seen Mara but that she'd heard something earlier. Around midnight.
"What kind of something?" I asked, keeping my voice soft.
The young woman looked at me. Then at Luca. Then back at me, like she'd decided I was safer to answer. "Footsteps," she said. "Going toward the end. And then—" She stopped.
"It's okay," I said. Clinical voice. The one that meant *I've heard worse, you can say it.*
"And then nothing," she said. "Like they just — stopped. In the middle of the hallway."
Luca thanked her. Told her to keep her door locked. She closed it and the chain slid back across.
We stood in the hallway.
At the end of it, the door.
Deadbolted. Still. No light underneath it tonight — the gap was completely dark. Which should have been less frightening than the moving shadow and the pacing light.
It wasn't.
"She went through," I said.
"I think so."
"And you can't—"
"No."
I looked at the door for a long moment. The darkness under it absolute. The deadbolt facing out, thick and solid and doing its job, locking from this side.
"Luca." I turned to him. He was looking at the door with an expression I hadn't seen before — not the composed management of someone running an operation, not the careful measured look of someone weighing words. Something rawer. Something that looked, in the low flickering light, a lot like grief. "Hey."
He looked at me.
"This isn't your fault," I said.
Something in his face shifted. "I should have moved her sooner. The six month rule — she was at four months, I thought I had time—"
"You couldn't have known tonight was the night."
"I should have—"
"Luca." I stepped closer. Not thinking about it, just doing it — the same instinct that moved you toward a patient who needed grounding, who needed something solid to orient to. "You can't watch all of them all the time. You can't be everywhere. You're one person managing something that—" I gestured at the floor, the hallway, the door. "Something that nobody should have to manage alone."
He looked at me. We were close — closer than the kitchen counter, closer than the fob handoff. The flickering light did things to the shadows on his face. The scar above his brow. The exhaustion he wasn't hiding right now.
"You said she talked about me," I said quietly. "What did she say?"
A pause. "That you were going to be important." He said it carefully. Like he'd been holding it for a while. "She said it the week after you moved in. I hadn't even told her about you yet."
"But it already knew I was here," I said. "You said that. Since I moved in."
"Yes."
"So she knew because it told her."
"Most likely."
"Important how?"
He looked at me for a long moment. The hallway was quiet. The cold moved between us, gentle and constant.
"I don't know," he said. "I've been trying to figure that out since the first night."
"Since the elevator."
"Since the elevator."
I held his gaze. Something was happening in the space between us — had been happening, probably, since the first night, building the way things built when you kept adding heat and had nowhere for it to go. The wrong place for it. The wrong time, two AM on a floor that ate people, a woman possibly gone behind a door twelve feet away.
Completely the wrong everything.
And yet.
"What do we do now?" I asked. My voice came out quieter than I intended.
"Tonight — nothing. I need to log the incident. Contact my — the people I report to. Figure out next steps." He exhaled slowly. "There's nothing we can do for her tonight."
"And if she's—"
"I know." His voice went rough at the edges. Just slightly. "I know."
I wanted to say something useful. Something clinical and grounded and practical. I wanted to give him the version of me that was good in emergencies, that stayed functional when things were alarming.
Instead I said: "Come on."
He looked at me. "What?"
"You're going to go back to your apartment and sit alone with all of this at two in the morning and that's—" I shook my head. "Come on. I'll make tea. You can do your logging thing from my kitchen table and at least be somewhere with lights that work properly."
He stared at me.
"I have good tea," I said. "And my lights don't flicker."
"Aria—"
"You said I was trusted. You brought me up here. You've been managing this alone for six years." I looked at him steadily. "Let someone sit in the room with you. That's all. Just — let someone be in the room."
The hallway was quiet.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he said: "You're still slightly warm."
"I'm fine."
"You said that already."
"It keeps being true." I held his gaze. "Tea, Luca. Come on."
Something in his expression — the grief, the exhaustion, the six years of careful alone — shifted. Not gone. But moved. Making room.
"Okay," he said quietly.
We took the elevator back up to seven.
Normal elevator. Steady panel. No anomalies.
At my door I unlocked both locks and pushed it open and the lights came on warm and steady and flickerless, my apartment in all its chaotic half-unpacked nursing-manual glory, exactly as I'd left it.
Luca stepped inside.
Looked around. Then at the print on the wall, straight and neat.
"You straightened it," I said.
"No," he said.
We looked at each other.
"Later," I said.
"Later," he agreed.
I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. He sat at my kitchen table, pulled out his phone, and started typing. Not talking. Not explaining. Just — present. In the room. The specific quiet of two people who had moved past the part where silence was uncomfortable.
The kettle boiled.
I made two cups.
Set one in front of him without asking how he took it. He looked at the cup, then at me.
"How did you know?" he asked.
"You drink your coffee black. People who drink their coffee black take their tea plain." I sat across from him. Pulled my knees up. Wrapped my hands around my mug. "Am I wrong?"
He looked at the tea. "No."
"Nursing school," I said. "We notice things."
And for the first time tonight — quiet, small, costing him something but giving something back too — he almost smiled.
Outside my window the city hummed its indifferent hum.
The cold corner was quiet.
The print stayed straight.
And in the kitchen at two in the morning, over tea neither of us would remember finishing, something shifted between us that neither of us named.
We didn't need to.
Not yet.