She pressed her palms against her eyes, the gesture so familiar it hurt. I'd seen her do that before, six months of hallway encounters, catching glimpses of her when she didn't know anyone was watching. The same motion. The same desperate attempt to block out whatever she was seeing.
"I'm sorry." Her voice came out muffled through her hands. "I didn't mean to wake you."
"You didn't. I wasn't sleeping."
She lowered her hands, and I saw the tracks of tears on her cheeks, the dark shadows under her eyes that I'd noticed before but never really let myself see.
"You should sleep," she said. "You have work tomorrow."
"Off shift. I'm fine."
A pause. Then, quietly: "You always say that. That you're fine."
"So do you."
Something flickered in her expression. The silence stretched, filled with all the things we'd never said to each other. Six months of hallway nods and averted eyes, and now this: me on my bedroom floor at three in the morning, both of us too tired to keep pretending.
"I heard you." The words came out before I could stop them.
Lucy stilled. "What?"
"Crying. Through the walls." I looked down at my hands, unable to meet her eyes. "I've heard you, at night. For months. And I never knew what to do about it."
I waited for her to tell me to leave, to accuse me of eavesdropping, to ask what the hell was wrong with me that I'd listen to her cry and never once knock on her door.
Instead, she said, "I heard you too."
I looked up.
"Pacing," she continued. "At night. Three in the morning, sometimes later. I always wondered what kept you awake."
You,I thought.The promise. Mateo. The sound of your grief through these thin walls and my complete inability to do anything about it.
I didn't say any of that. Just held her gaze in the moonlight, two people who'd been suffering alone in apartments twelve feet apart, finally admitting they'd heard each other the whole time.
"We are partners in suffering, aren't we?" Lucy whispered.
Something almost like a smile crossed her face. Broken, exhausted, but real.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess we are."
I didn't leave. And she didn't ask me to.
Instead, I settled onto the floor beside the bed, my back against the wall, my eyes on the door.
She didn't say anything. But after a while, her breathing evened out, and the tension drained from her shoulders, and she slept.
I stayed awake. Watching. Listening.
Keeping the promise.
Morning came gray and quiet, light filtering through the curtains I hadn't closed. Lucy was still asleep, her face softer than I'd seen it, the lines of tension temporarily smoothed away. I kept watching her for a moment longer than I should have, then pushed myself up from the floor, my back protesting the hours on the hard surface, and decided to make some coffee.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway twenty minutes later, wrapped in the blanket I'd given herlast night, her hair messy and her eyes still heavy with sleep.
"Coffee?" I offered it to her as I moved my arm toward her with the coffee pot.
She nodded, and I poured her a cup. Fixed it up without thinking: cream, no sugar, extra hot. The way Mateo used to make it for her, the way I'd watched him do a hundred times during Sunday breakfasts at the firehouse, the detail that had stuck in my memory even though I'd tried so hard to forget.
