Mia POV
The key is exactly what I asked for.
Not a digital fob, not a code, not something that lives in an app on my phone that someone else can monitor. An actual physical key on a plain silver ring, waiting in an envelope with my name on it at the front desk when I arrive Saturday morning. I hold it in my palm for a second before I put it in my pocket. Small. Ordinary. Mine.
The elevator requires a separate code to reach the top floor, Lucian's code, which he texts me at 9 a.m. Saturday with no accompanying message, just the six digits. I type it in. The elevator moves. I watch the numbers go up, and I tell myself this is temporary, practical, a strategic decision made with a clear head, and I believe approximately sixty percent of that.
The doors open directly into the penthouse.
I step out and stop.
I have been in nice places before. The Shen family home was large and well-appointed and full of the kind of furniture that communicates wealth without shouting about it. I have been to penthouses for events, for parties, for the kind of business dinners my father used to bring me to, so I could practice being polished in professional company.
I have not been in a place like this.
It is not the size, though it is enormous. It is not the view, though the floor-to-ceiling windows show the entire city laid out like it has been arranged specifically for this apartment, like the city was built around it and not the other way around. It is the feeling of the space, precise, controlled, every element intentional. Nothing soft. Nothing accidental. Everything is chosen for a specific reason by someone who thinks in systems and has applied that thinking to every corner of the place he lives.
It looks exactly like Lucian.
It is also, despite all of that, very beautiful. I do not want to find it beautiful. I find it beautiful anyway.
He is waiting near the elevator. He is in a weekend version of himself, no tie, sleeves pushed up, but still somehow completely pulled together in the way he always is, like even his casual is considered. He looks at me looking at the apartment and says nothing, which I appreciate more than I would have appreciated any comment.
"Your floor," he says, and leads me left.
My floor is smaller than his, which is still large. It has a living area, a bedroom, and a bathroom that is bigger than my hotel room was. The bedroom has a lock. He shows me this first, before anything else, opens the door and points to it and says: "Key's in the lock from the inside. The only copy." He hands me a second one. "That's the only other copy. I don't have one."
I look at him.
He looks back.
"I know," I say.
He nods, like that's settled, and moves on to showing me the rest with the brisk efficiency of someone giving a property tour: the thermostat, the wifi code written on a card by the desk, the laundry on this floor, the fire exits, because he is apparently the kind of person who shows people fire exits.
We establish the rules. They are simple, and we both state them as facts rather than negotiations, which is the right way to do it.
She cooks her own food. He stays in his wing in the evenings. They do not eat together. She comes and goes as she needs. He does not ask where.
"Anything else?" he says.
"If I need to reach you about the investigation, how do you want me to?"
"Call. Any time."
"And if it's not about the investigation."
A pause. Something moves through his expression quickly, carefully managed. "Call," he says. Same tone. Like, there is no difference.
I hold his gaze for one second. Two.
"Okay," I say.
He leaves me to unpack.
I am good at making spaces mine quickly. Two years of student living abroad taught me that you learn to put one or two things in the right places, and suddenly, a generic room has a person in it. I put my books on the nightstand. I put Lin Wei's textile piece, still in its box, on the shelf where I can see it. I put my debate notes from the Paris project on the desk because I like seeing my own work.
By noon, it doesn't feel like home, but like somewhere I live.
Which is something.
I spend the afternoon on my laptop at the desk. Job applications, research, and the ongoing project of rebuilding. I make coffee in the small kitchen on my floor. I eat lunch alone, something simple, food I bought myself on the way here. I do not see Lucian. I do not hear him. The penthouse is large enough and quiet enough that I could almost believe I am completely alone.
I go to bed at eleven.
I sleep better than I have in a week.
Night two is when I find the groceries.
I come out of my room at seven in the morning, planning to make tea with the single box I brought from the hotel, and when I walk into the kitchen on my floor, the counter has things on it that were not there yesterday.
I stop in the doorway.
It is not a dramatic display. No bow, no note. Just groceries, placed on the counter with the same precision as everything else in this apartment, grouped logically, the cold things already in the refrigerator, the dry things stacked neatly. A specific brand of tea. The exact kind of bread I like, which is a slightly unusual brand that the supermarket near the family house stocked, but most others don't. Greek yogurt, the plain kind, the specific percentage. Oranges. The brand of coffee I switched to in Paris and mentioned, once, at a family breakfast, as being better than what they had.
Once. I mentioned it once.
I stand in the kitchen doorway and look at all of it and feel something I am not ready to name.
He remembered. Not approximately not a general she likes tea and fruit approximation. Specifically. Exactly. Every item is the right version of the thing, which means he was not guessing and he was not estimating. He was paying attention. He has been paying attention, apparently, to the small details of what I eat and prefer and has mentioned in passing, for long enough that he could reconstruct my grocery list from memory.
I did not know I had a grocery list until I saw it laid out on this counter.
I thought my preferences were just background noise. The ordinary texture of daily life, not remarkable, not worth noting. It never occurred to me that someone was noting them. Filing them away. Keeping them safe for a moment exactly like this one, when I have nothing, and he can give back to me a version of the small, specific, ordinary things that were mine.
I stand there longer than I should.
I am not going to be affected by groceries. I am a grown adult, and groceries are a practical item, and this is a practical arrangement, and I am completely fine.
I make my tea.
I eat the yogurt standing at the counter because I am not yet at the stage of this arrangement where I sit down for breakfast like a person who lives here.
I drink the tea, and it is exactly right.
I look at the oranges and think: he knew about the oranges.
I carry my empty cup to the sink.
I rinse it.
I am reaching for a dish towel when I remember that I left my laptop charger in the living area downstairs, not my floor's living area, but the main one, where I sat for twenty minutes yesterday while Lucian showed me the apartment. I left it on the side table near the sofa. I need it.
I walk out of the kitchen into the short hallway that connects my floor to the main staircase.
And I stop.
Lucian is in the hallway.
Not walking through it. Not coming from somewhere or going somewhere. Just standing there. Slightly to the left of the kitchen doorway, facing it, completely still. He is holding a coffee cup, and he is looking at the kitchen door, the door I just came through, with an expression I recognize because I have seen it before.
Patient. Present. Waiting.
Like he has been standing there for a while.
Like he was listening to me move around in the kitchen and did not want to intrude, and could not quite make himself walk away.
He sees me see him.
A beat of silence.
Neither of us moves.
His expression does not change exactly, but something in it shifts, something that was private becoming less so because I am looking directly at it, and he knows I am reading it correctly. He is not embarrassed. Lucian does not do embarrassed. But he is caught. In a specific way, you are caught when someone sees the thing you were doing when you thought you were alone.
He was standing in the hallway listening to me exist in the kitchen.
With the groceries he bought.
The groceries he bought from a list he built from years of paying attention.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
"Your charger," he says. "You left it downstairs. I put it on the stairs."
"Thank you," I say.
My voice is completely even.
He is, too.
We are both lying through our teeth, and we both know it, and neither of us says another word, and I walk to the stairs and pick up my charger and go back to my room and close the door and stand on the other side of it with my heart doing something it has absolutely no business doing.
He was standing in the hallway.
He bought the oranges.
I press my back against the door and look at the ceiling and think: one month. I said one month.
I think: I am in so much trouble.