"I sent a message. One of them is good with property assessments. The other—" I consider how to describe Finn in one sentence. "—will be useful." I decide that's sufficient. "I want to know who has access to this building and whether the damage to the ceiling required entry from outside or could be done from within. And someone needs to look at that lock."
She stares at me.
"Why are you helping me?"
I meet her eyes.
The question is direct and deserves a direct answer, and the direct answer is: I don't have one I can articulate cleanly. The honest answer involves her scent and the book she picked up first, and the way she said the words Lucky Clover Lounge with the specific, tender carefulness of someone handling somethingthey've kept safe for a long time and don't yet know is already real. The honest answer is that I stopped because of rain and stayed because of something else and at this hour, I'm not in the business of examining what that something else is in real time.
I say nothing.
I look back at her and let the silence do what silences do.
She sighs.
"Okay." A beat. "Can I get you something? I know the—" She looks at the apartment. "—conditions are odd."
The ghost of something moves across my expression—not quite a smile, the closest I reliably get.
"I can wait. Sleep."
She nods and moves toward the single door off the main room.
Opens it.
Stops.
I cross the floor until I’m standing behind her.
The bedroom is worse than the main room.
The ceiling here took the full impact—the holes are more numerous, less precise, the kind of damage that suggests either more time was spent here or the structure above was already compromised and the intervention accelerated what was already failing. The mattress on the floor—twin, a reasonable practical choice for someone living alone in a small space—is completely saturated. The sheets have absorbed what the mattress didn't. The clothes: such as there are, the small wardrobe of someone who lives efficiently rather than abundantly, are scattered and in several cases torn.
That part is what stays with me.
The ceiling damage is vandalism with practical effect—it compromises the space. The torn clothes are something else. That's personal. That's someone expressing an opinion about the person who wears them.
"Fuck," I say quietly.
"I've been through worse."
I turn to look at her.
She says it with the flat delivery of a statement of fact rather than a claim for sympathy, which makes it considerably more devastating than sympathy-seeking would be. She's not performing resilience. She's just reporting.
I've been through worse.
The three men. The fifty thousand. The calls. The third notice.
She has been through worse and she's still standing in a doorway looking at a ruined room and her first statement is a matter-of-fact comparison to previous damage.
Something in my chest does something specific.
I set it aside.
Mila pulls the door most of the way closed—not all the way, as if closing it entirely would constitute accepting it—and reaches for her phone again.
I watch her press the button.
