FOR FOUR MONTHS, I KEPT MY NEIGHBOR A STRANGER. ONE NIGHT SHE KNOCKED MY DOOR NOT KNOWING OUR RELATIONSHIP WOULD CHANGE
Part 1
The night Leah Bennett finally knocked on my door, I was standing in my kitchen, eating cereal out of a coffee mug because every single one of my bowls was dirty. That sentence tells you almost everything you need to know about the glamorous, fulfilling life I was leading at thirty-three. It was exactly 11:42 p.m. on a Thursday choked with rain, the kind of relentless downpour that painted the windows black and made the whole apartment building groan and creak like it was breathing around me. I had a major deadline breathing down my neck for the morning, a half-finished set of architectural drawings glaring at me from my laptop screen, and absolutely no intention of speaking to another human being until Saturday at the earliest.
Then came the knock.
It wasn’t just any knock. It was a pattern: three quick, firm taps, a pregnant pause, then two softer, almost hesitant ones. A strange, specific rhythm. I knew it was her before I even moved. I knew it was Leah. This wasn’t because we were close; we weren’t. In fact, that was the entire problem. I had spent the last four months meticulously, painstakingly ensuring that we were nothing more than strangers who shared a wall.
She lived in 4B, and I lived in 4A. We were mirror images of solitude separated by a few inches of drywall. We shared the same long hallway, the same thin walls that failed to keep secrets, the same perpetually unreliable elevator, and the same uninspired view of the brick building across the alley. She had moved in at the beginning of September, a whirlwind of six potted plants, three wildly mismatched lamps, and a laugh that could carry through drywall like a beam of warm light, disrupting the carefully curated gloom of my existence.
I noticed her immediately. How could I not? Leah was thirty-one, an art teacher at the middle school six blocks away. She had a cascade of dark curls she often pinned up with stray pencils, and her wrists were more frequently adorned with smudges of paint than with jewelry. She possessed this unnerving ability to look at people as if she were actually paying attention, a trait that was particularly dangerous if you were a man trying with all his might not to be seen.
And I was trying. Desperately. Ever since my engagement had imploded the year before, I had constructed a fortress of a life built from simple, sturdy materials: work, takeout, and a fierce, unwavering commitment to not getting attached to anyone who might one day stand in my kitchen and calmly explain why loving me had become an inconvenience.
Then Leah moved in next door and single-handedly ruined the quiet. She had borrowed my stepladder during her first week, returning it with a loaf of homemade banana bread. I let it sit on my counter for two full days, avoiding it like it was radioactive. Accepting homemade food from a kind, beautiful woman felt like the first, irreversible step in a well-known cautionary tale I had no interest in starring in. Then, at midnight, I devoured the entire loaf over my sink like a starved animal.
After that, I got careful. I became a creature of strategy and avoidance. If I heard her door creak open, I’d wait, counting the seconds until the sound of her footsteps faded down the hall. If we happened to reach the mailboxes at the same time, I’d abruptly slap my pockets and pretend I’d forgotten something crucial, spinning on my heel and retreating. If she smiled at me in the hallway—a warm, genuine smile that could power a small city—I would offer back the sort of curt, dismissive nod usually exchanged between two men at a gas station. Polite, brief, and emotionally useless.
She noticed. Of course, she did. She was a woman who paid attention. One crisp November morning, she caught me red-handed as I was trying to make a covert escape into the stairwell with a bag of trash. “You know,” she’d said, leaning against her doorframe and holding a cup of coffee, “for neighbors, you and I have an impressively long-distance relationship.”
I should have laughed. A part of me, a long-dormant part, actually wanted to. Instead, I clutched my trash bag like a shield and mumbled, “I’m just bad with people before caffeine.”
She glanced down at the coffee cup in my own hand. “It’s full,” she observed, her voice laced with amusement.
I looked down at it as if it had personally betrayed me.
She smiled, a slow, knowing smile. “Interesting.” That single word, that smile, followed me all the way down the stairwell and echoed in my head for the next four floors.
So, when she knocked on my door that rainy Thursday night, I knew something had to be wrong. Not because she would ever need me, specifically, but because Leah Bennett didn’t strike me as the type of woman who knocks on a man’s door at almost midnight unless she had already exhausted at least five better, more reliable options.
I opened it.
She stood in the dim hallway, wearing a simple green dress, its hem soaked dark from the rain. She held one of her heels in her hand, the other still on her foot, giving her a lopsided, vulnerable tilt. Her curls had escaped their pins and framed her face in a damp halo. Her eyeliner was slightly smudged, but her chin was held high, projecting an air of defiance, as if she had just finished arguing with the entire world and had stubbornly refused to let it see her shake. For one dizzying second, I forgot every single sensible, self-protective rule I had ever laid out for myself.
Then she spoke, her voice cutting through my trance. “Before you pretend you don’t know who I am, I need a favor.”
My hand instinctively tightened on the doorknob. “Are you okay?”
“That,” she said, her eyes locking onto mine, “depends entirely on how convincing you are as a fake boyfriend.”
I just blinked, processing the bizarre sequence of words. From behind her, down the hallway near the elevator, a man’s voice called out, sharp and impatient. “Leah, come on, just talk to me.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine. They were a storm of emotions—not frightened, exactly, but a turbulent mix of angry, embarrassed, and utterly exhausted. Yet, underneath it all, there was something softer, a flicker of raw vulnerability that made my chest tighten in a painful, unfamiliar way.
“Do you want me to call security?” I asked, my voice low.
“I already did. He’ll be gone in two minutes,” she said, lifting her bare heel slightly off the floor. “I just need him to stop thinking I’m alone right now.”
That should have been simple. A straightforward, low-risk transaction. Step into the hallway, play the part for a moment, say a few protective words, close the door, and immediately return to my sad mug of cereal and my meticulously curated, emotionally unavailable lifestyle.
Instead, I opened the door wider.
Leah’s gaze flickered past my shoulder, taking in the messy reality of my apartment, before snapping back to my face. A look of surprise crossed her features. “You’re letting me in?”
“I’m not letting you stand in the hallway with only one shoe on and a bad-man monologue happening behind you,” I said.
Her mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile. “That was almost charming.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
She stepped inside. The second she passed me, the air shifted. I was hit with the scent of rain, vanilla, and something subtly floral—probably from whatever shampoo women like Leah use to make men fundamentally rethink their entire personalities. I closed the door but didn’t latch the deadbolt just yet. Through the solid wood, the man’s footsteps grew closer, more insistent.
“Leah,” he called out again, his voice muffled but sharp. “I know you’re in there.”
She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, a fleeting moment of pure weariness.
I kept my voice low, a conspiratorial whisper. “What’s his name?”
“Aaron,” she breathed. “Ex-fiancé. Recently upgraded to public nuisance.” The sharpness was back in her tone. Not helpless. Leah Bennett had edges. I found myself liking that far more than I should have.
I raised my voice, pitching it just enough to carry clearly through the door. “Babe, you want me to handle this, or should we just let security do it?”
Leah looked at me, and in that instant, something profound changed in her face. It wasn’t just relief; it was something closer to recognition. As if she hadn’t truly expected me to play along so easily. As if, perhaps, she had fully expected me to stay hidden behind my door, the same way I’d been hiding for the past four months.
The hallway fell silent. A moment later, we heard Aaron mutter something I couldn’t quite make out, followed by the definitive, final ding of the elevator arriving. Leah exhaled, a slow, controlled breath that seemed to carry the weight of the entire night. I waited until I heard the elevator doors slide shut before I finally turned the deadbolt, the heavy click echoing in the sudden quiet of my apartment.
“Tea?” I asked.
She just stared at me, her expression incredulous. “What?”
“Tea. Do you want some?”
“You just ‘fake-boyfriended’ a man through a solid wood door, and now you’re casually offering me tea?”
I shrugged, turning toward the kitchen. “I’m versatile.”
A laugh slipped out of her then. It was a small, surprised, genuine sound. And there it was. In that single, unguarded moment, I understood. That was the reason I had avoided her. Because making Leah Bennett laugh felt entirely too good.
She limped slightly as she followed me toward my kitchen, still clutching her single heel like a strange trophy. “Do you have anything stronger than tea?”
“I have old whiskey and a surplus of emotional baggage,” I offered.
“Tempting,” she said, a hint of her earlier humor returning, “but tea is fine.”
I filled the kettle while she stood near my counter, her eyes scanning the room, taking in the details of my life like she was learning things about me against my will. The rolled-up blueprints on the table. The single, sad-looking plant on the windowsill that she had once commented was “bravely dying.” The clean bowls sitting neatly stacked in the dishwasher that I hadn’t bothered to unload. Her gaze finally landed on the coffee mug I had left in the sink.
“Were you eating cereal out of that?”
I glanced at it, a flush of embarrassment creeping up my neck. “No.”
“Miles.”
I hated how good my name sounded in her voice. “Yes.”
She smiled, and this time, it was a real smile that actually reached her eyes, crinkling the corners. “I handed her a dish towel from the drawer. Our fingers brushed when she took it. It was nothing, less than nothing—a fleeting, accidental touch. But the warmth of her skin shot up my arm like a silent warning bell. She wrapped the towel around her shoulders and leaned back against my counter, a thoughtful expression on her face.
“Why do you avoid me?” she asked. Just like that. No warm-up, no preamble, no mercy.
I opened a cabinet and slowly took down two mugs, buying myself time I didn’t really have. “I don’t avoid you.”
“You once waited inside your apartment for twelve full minutes because you heard me talking to Mrs. Alvarez by the elevator.”
I turned to face her, stunned. “How would you possibly know that?”
“I could see your shadow under the door.”
I instinctively looked down at the floor, as if it would have the answer. She laughed again, a softer sound this time. “Relax, I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?”
“No.” Her smile faded just a little. “I just wondered if I’d done something wrong.”
That hit me harder than it should have. The fact that she was standing in my kitchen, soaked from the rain, and brave enough to ask for the very thing most people just punish you for not explaining. She wasn’t blaming me; she was blaming herself.
“No,” I said, my voice firmer than I expected. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then what is it?”
The kettle began to hum behind me, the sound growing steadily louder, filling the tense silence. I could have lied. I was good at that kind of lie—not the cruel, malicious ones, but the small, evasive ones designed for self-preservation. I’m busy with work. I’m just a private person. I’m not great with neighbors. But Leah’s eyes were on me, direct and searching, and for the first time in four miserable months, I was bone-tired of being a coward in my own hallway.
So, I told her a sliver of the truth. “You make quiet feel less safe.”
She went completely still, her expression unreadable.
I cleared my throat, the words suddenly feeling clumsy and foolish in the air. “That sounded better in my head.”
“No,” she said carefully, her voice barely a whisper. “It didn’t sound bad.”
The rain tapped a gentle rhythm against the windowpanes. The kettle clicked off, plunging the kitchen back into a heavy silence. Neither of us moved. It felt like a lifetime stretched between two heartbeats.
Then her phone, which she had set on the counter, buzzed twice. She glanced at the screen, and I watched as all the color drained from her face in one slow, visible wave. I looked before I could stop myself, my eyes drawn to the illuminated screen.
It was a text from Aaron.
“Tell your boyfriend I’ll see him tomorrow at your sister’s engagement party.”
Leah squeezed her eyes shut. I stared at the phone, then back at her pale, stricken face. She opened her eyes and gave me a smile so thin, so fragile, it looked like it might shatter.
“So,” she said, her voice trembling almost imperceptibly. “There’s one more thing I probably should have mentioned.”
Part 2
“There’s one more thing I probably should have mentioned,” Leah said, the words hanging in the air like smoke. She delivered the line with the strained nonchalance of a woman describing a small kitchen fire she had decided to re-brand as “ambiance.” I looked from the glowing screen of her phone to her face, which was growing paler by the second.
“Your sister’s engagement party?” I clarified.
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And your ex-fiancé, the public nuisance, now thinks I’m attending as your boyfriend?”
She pressed her lips into a thin, grim line. “Technically, you invited yourself when you called me ‘babe’.”
“I was improvising under duress!”
“You were very convincing,” she countered. “You have emotional range.”
“That’s not a legally binding contract.” I dragged a hand down my face, the absurdity of the situation crashing down on me. Leah reached for her phone, then hesitated, her hand hovering over it as if the screen might actually bite her.
“I’m sorry, really,” she said, her voice sincere. “I never meant to pull you into anything beyond the hallway.”
The kettle sat on the counter between us, its promise of warm tea cooling with every passing second. I should have said no. Any sane, rational man would have. I should have pointed her to the door, wished her the best of luck, and returned to my quiet, fortified existence. I barely knew her. We had exchanged fewer than fifty sentences in four months, and at least ten of mine had been banal complaints about the elevator maintenance.
But she stood there in my kitchen, wrapped in my towel, wearing a rain-darkened green dress and pretending with all her might not to look utterly humiliated. All I could think about was Aaron, a man I’d never met, and how he had probably spent years learning exactly where to press on her spirit until she folded. And I hated him for it. More inconveniently, I found myself admiring the fact that Leah still hadn’t folded.
“Why does he even care if you bring someone?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“My family loved Aaron,” she said, then let out a single, humorless laugh. “Actually, no. That’s not right. My family loved the version of Aaron he performed for them at Sunday brunch.”
“And he’s invited to the party tomorrow?”
“My sister’s fiancé is his cousin.”
I winced. “That is an aggressively inconvenient family tree.”
“Right?” Her shoulders loosened a fraction, a tiny release of tension. “Anyway, my original plan was to go alone, smile until my cheeks cracked, and leave obscenely early. Then Aaron showed up tonight to ‘talk sense into me’.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he wants me back,” she said, her voice laced with weary frustration. “Seeing me single makes him think the door is still open.” She finally picked up her phone and turned it face down on the counter. “Apparently, my imaginary boyfriend has now slammed it shut.”
There was something almost hopeful in the way she said it. And that tiny, fragile sliver of hope did me in. I poured hot water over two tea bags I didn’t even remember choosing.
“What time?”
Leah blinked, confused. “What?”
“The party,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head immediately. “Miles, I wasn’t asking you to actually come.”
“I know.”
“You have work. You’re always working.”
“I do always have work,” I conceded.
“You don’t even like parties.”
“I don’t even like most people,” I corrected her.
Her mouth tilted into a small, wry smile. “That’s true.”
“And yet,” I said, letting the words hang in the air.
She studied me for a long moment, the rain streaking down the window behind her. The dim kitchen light softened the sharp worry that had been clinging to the edges of her face. “Why would you do this?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Because your laugh makes my apartment feel less empty. Because I have been actively pretending not to want you since September. Because when you looked at me like I might actually be a safe harbor, something broken in me wanted to become worthy of it.
“Because you brought me banana bread,” I said instead.
Her eyes narrowed. “Four months ago?”
“It was excellent bread.”
A real smile finally appeared then—slow, bright, and utterly dangerous. “Fine,” she said. “But if you’re going to be my fake boyfriend, we need a plausible story.”
“We met as neighbors.”
“Too boring. That’s literally what happened.”
“Romance requires editing, Miles,” she said, tapping her chin as she considered me. “Okay, how about this: We hated each other at first.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“I know,” she said, her eyes glinting with mischief. “That’s what makes it fun.”
I tried not to smile and failed spectacularly. She noticed. Of course she noticed. Her gaze dropped to my mouth for half a second, and the temperature in the room changed. Just a little. But it was enough. She looked away first, wrapping both her hands around her warm mug of tea.
“We met when I needed that ladder,” she began, crafting the narrative. “You were grumpy, but secretly kind.”
“Secretly?”
“You hide it well, under all that flannel and emotional frost.”
“I’m not wearing flannel.”
“Not tonight, no. But spiritually, you are.”
I laughed, a real, unforced laugh that seemed to surprise both of us. Leah’s expression softened in a way that felt more intimate than if she had reached out and touched me. “There,” she said quietly. “I knew you could.” The words landed somewhere deep behind my ribs, warm and unsettling. I looked down into my tea, suddenly unable to meet her gaze. For a minute, we just stood there in the quiet, listening to the rain and the old pipes knocking in the walls. It should have been awkward. It wasn’t. It felt like the kind of comfortable silence you only earn after knowing someone for much longer than one rainy night.
Finally, she broke the spell. “Your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“Girlfriend interview. If we’re selling this tomorrow, I need facts. Favorite food?”
“Cereal, apparently.”
“No, a real answer.”
“Thai.”
“Good. Mine is pasta, in any emotionally significant form.”
“Favorite movie?”
“Rear Window.”
She pointed a finger at me. “That explains so much.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re a watcher,” she said gently, not as an accusation, but as a simple observation. Like she had seen the fundamental shape of me and wasn’t offended by it.
“I used to be less boring,” I admitted, the words escaping before I could stop them.
Her teasing expression faded. “Before?”
I didn’t have to ask how she knew there was a “before.” “Before my ex-fiancée left,” I said, the confession tasting like rust in my mouth. “She decided, three months before our wedding, that she didn’t want a life that looked like ours. Like mine.” I shrugged, a gesture that felt too heavy to be casual. “A quiet apartment, deadlines, weekends spent at home. Me.”
“That was cruel,” Leah said softly.
“It was honest.”
“Those two things can overlap,” she countered, and then she stepped closer, just one small, deliberate step. “For what it’s worth,” she said, her voice dropping even lower, “quiet doesn’t scare me.”
I looked at her, really looked at her. “No?”
“No.” Her gaze was unwavering. “Lonely does.”
The air between us thinned, crackling with a sudden charge. She was close enough now that I could see a tiny fleck of gold near the iris of her left eye. Close enough that if I just reached out my hand, my fingers could brush against the damp curl of hair resting against her cheek. I didn’t. But I wanted to. And that wanting felt like the first truly dangerous thing I had allowed myself to feel in over a year.
Part 3
Leah set her mug down on the counter. “We should practice.”
My brain, completely unhelpful, offered up several possible interpretations of that sentence, each one more reckless than the last. “Practice?”
“Being convincing,” she clarified, though the corner of her mouth lifted, and a faint blush colored her cheeks. “Relax. I mean holding hands.”
“Right.”
“Unless, of course, hand-holding is too advanced for your level of emotional frost.”
“You’re enjoying this way too much.”
“A little,” she admitted, and offered her hand.
I looked at it for one ridiculous, frozen second, as if it were a legal document I was about to sign. Then, I took it. Her hand was smaller than mine, warm from the tea mug, her fingers sliding between mine with a careful, surprising confidence. It was a simple, innocent touch. And it hit me with more force than Aaron’s threatening text. I felt Leah inhale softly. I glanced at her.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, but her voice had changed, becoming breathy. “You?”
“No,” I blurted out, then immediately corrected myself. “I mean, yes. I mean…” I let out a short, flustered laugh. “This is not going to be difficult to fake.” There it was again. Too honest.
Her fingers tightened around mine. “No,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “It isn’t.”
For a moment, neither of us was pretending. Then a loud, insistent buzz broke through the quiet intimacy of the apartment. It wasn’t her phone. It was mine. I reached for it with my free hand, still holding hers because the thought of letting go suddenly felt fundamentally wrong. The building’s front desk number flashed across the screen. I answered.
“Miles Carter?” It was the night doorman, his voice laced with unease. “Sorry to bother you, sir. There’s a man downstairs asking for Ms. Bennett. Says he… uh… forgot his coat in your apartment.”
Leah’s face hardened, all the softness from a moment ago vanishing. I looked down at our joined hands, then back at her. This time, she didn’t look alone. She looked at me, and her expression was clear: she wanted me beside her in this fight. So I squeezed her hand once, a silent promise, and spoke into the phone with a cold resolve I didn’t know I possessed. “Tell him he’s mistaken. And if he doesn’t leave the premises immediately, call the police.” Then I hung up before the night could take anything more from us.
Leah swallowed hard. “Miles.”
“I’ll go tomorrow,” I said, my decision solidifying into something unbreakable.
Her eyes searched mine, wide and uncertain. “To the party?” she asked.
I nodded. “As your boyfriend.”
Her thumb moved lightly, almost unconsciously, over my knuckle. “Fake boyfriend,” she corrected, but this time, neither of us sounded convinced.
The next day passed in a blur of anxiety and strange, unfamiliar anticipation. By two p.m., Leah knocked on my door. This time, I opened it too quickly. Her eyebrows rose. “Were you waiting right behind it?”
“No,” I lied.
“Shadow under the door, Miles,” she teased. I looked down. She was right. She laughed, and then I saw her—really saw her. She wore a soft blue dress under a camel-colored coat, her dark curls pinned loosely at the nape of her neck. She looked beautiful in a way that made me temporarily forget the basic mechanics of speech.
“You look…” I started, then stopped myself before the word ‘devastating’ could escape and ruin both of our lives. “You look like nobody at that party deserves you.”
Her expression shifted. It wasn’t a big change, just a pause, a quiet intake of breath. It was as if the compliment had found an old bruise and, instead of causing pain, had warmed it. “Careful, Miles,” she said softly. “That sounded real.”
“It was,” I admitted.
We went to the party. We held hands. We performed. We told her family our edited love story, a tale of grumpy neighbors and seductive banana bread. For the first hour, it felt like a play, and we were both brilliant actors. I was starting to believe we could actually pull it off.
Then Aaron arrived. I felt Leah’s hand stiffen in mine before I even saw him. He was handsome in that polished, generic way of men who frequently check their reflection in spoons. He looked at our joined hands, his eyes dead. “And this must be the neighbor,” he said, his voice dripping with condescension.
Leah stood her ground, but I could feel the tremor in her hand. Later, on the restaurant’s chilly patio, after a tense exchange, she finally confessed the real reason she’d ended their engagement. It wasn’t a dramatic betrayal. It was a slow, quiet erosion of her soul.
“I ended it,” she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears, “because one morning I realized I was practicing how to be smaller before I even had breakfast. Quieter, easier, less opinionated, less… myself. And then he told me he loved me because I was so adaptable.” She looked away, shamefaced. “That was it. That was the big scandal. I left because I didn’t want to disappear politely.”
The story resonated with the part of me that had spent the last year disappearing on purpose. “Leah,” I said, stepping closer. “I’m really glad you didn’t.” I took her hand. “Being yourself is the reason.”
She leaned forward, resting her forehead against my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her. Not for an audience, not for Aaron, not for any performance. Just because I wanted to hold her, and she wanted to be held.
“You keep doing that,” she murmured into my jacket moments later.
“What?”
“Choosing me. Even when no one is watching.”
My throat tightened. “Leah,” I said, “I think that’s the only kind that counts.”
The world seemed to fall away. She rose on her toes and kissed me. It was gentle for about two seconds. Then her fingers curled into my jacket, my hand slid to her waist, and the whole miserable, lonely year I’d spent in hiding seemed to go silent. She tasted like champagne and rain and a risk I suddenly wanted badly enough to stop pretending I was safe without it.
When we finally broke apart, we stayed close, breathing the same cold air. “That,” she said, a little breathless, “was definitely not in the plan.”
“No?”
She shook her head, a slow smile spreading across her face. “But it was convincing.”
I smiled back, leaning my forehead against hers. “Ready?” I asked, taking her hand again as we prepared to go back inside.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice clear and strong. “I am.” This time, it didn’t feel like acting at all.
Back at her apartment after the party, the charade was over. The air was thick with unspoken questions. I saw the painting then—a canvas by her window depicting my building, and in one lit window, a silhouette of a man holding a mug. Me.
“You saw me,” I said, the realization dawning on me. For months, I thought I’d been the only one watching.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Just then, our phones buzzed in unison. It was a photo from the party, sent by her sister. Me looking at Leah as if she were the only person in the universe. Beneath it, a text from her mom about Sunday dinner. Then, a new message from Aaron flashed on her screen: Enjoy playing house. It won’t last.
Her smile vanished. I crossed the room and took her hand. She looked up at me, shaken, but not retreating. “Stay?” she asked, her voice small.
I threaded my fingers through hers. “Yeah,” I said, my voice leaving no room for doubt. “I’m staying.”
I stayed. Not on the sofa, but in her life. We had our first real date the next night, eating Thai food on my living room floor. By the third date, she had a key to my apartment. By the tenth, I’d stopped counting. We fell into a rhythm that felt less like a new relationship and more like a homecoming. We didn’t rush. We just… were.
Six months after that rainy night, we moved into a bigger apartment on the fifth floor, one with better light. We took down the wall between us for good. Sometimes, late at night when the rain hits the windows, I’ll find her painting by the glass. I’ll stand behind her, wrap my arms around her waist, and watch our reflection appear over the glittering city lights. Her dark curls against my cheek, her hands stained with paint, and my face, no longer looking like a man who was waiting for life to safely pass him by.
The woman next door knocked on my door once. I opened it. And somehow, against all odds, that was the beginning of home.