Thud.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter under my breath.
I push my chair back harder than necessary. Through the narrow window, I catch sight of her on the porch, wrestling with two enormous boxes stacked wrong-side-up, as if gravity personally insulted her. She shoulders one, stumbles, and kicks it like it insulted her first.
The box wins.
I rub a hand over my face. She’s been here what—two weeks? And somehow she’s broken the sound barrier without technically doing anything wrong. She just… exists loudly. Even when she isn’t speaking.
Noise follows her the way quiet follows me.
And she orders everything online. Everything. Half the time, she’s not home when deliveries arrive, so the driver leaves them with me—apparently, I look like someone trustworthy. That’s how I learned her legal surname. Vale.
Not that she’s ever introduced herself with it.
But Lily said she introduced herself as Lucky, so that’s what I call her. Lucky, or Lu, when she signs the notes she leaves taped to my door to thank me for collecting things.
Who she really is…well… I’m not sure she’s tethered to a single version of herself. Not yet.
But the parcels keep coming. Cosmetics. Cables. Books. Art supplies. Protein bars. Once, bizarrely, a deep freezer she absolutely didn’t have space for.
It shouldn’t matter. None of it should matter.
But it does. It gets under my skin in a way I can’t quite quantify.
I return to my desk. Try to focus. Try to get ahead on the documentation I owe before the weekend. Try to re-establish the peace that usually comes so easily.
Do not get dragged into her hurricane.
I type three words. Delete them. Type two more. Delete again.
Then I hear it. It’s faint at first, carried on the early sun-warmed stillness.
Click-click-click.
Her engine.
Trying and failing.
Again.
Click.
I close my eyes. Count to three.
Of course.
Of course, it’s her.
I stay still for a moment longer than I should, listening to the silence between clicks. Listening to the way my body reacts—annoyance first, but something else right behind it. Something warm, unwelcome, inevitable.
By the fourth click, I’m already on my feet.
I stand, shove the side door of the garage open, and step outside.
The morning is quiet except for her SUV coughing out its last electrical breath. Lucky sits in the driver’s seat, forehead almost touching the wheel, sunglasses tilted crooked like they gave up trying to help her see. Her hair is a mess of dark waves and irritation.
She tries the ignition again.
