I haven’t changed my mind. I just can’t sleep.
Those are different things.
The ceiling has a knot in one of the beams. I’ve been staring at it for forty minutes. I know it intimately now. It looks like a question mark if you tilt your head, which feels appropriate.
What kind of mistake requires me?
I’ve been trying to answer that for two hours. I have nothing. What I do have is apple cinnamon muffins arranged in perfectly equal lines which also happen to be the best I’ve ever had.
I get up. Not gracefully. I peel myself off the floor one protesting joint at a time, wrap the blanket around my shoulders like a cape. Not because I need it, the house is warm—he made sure of that—but because it’s two in the morning and I’m about to raid a kidnapper’s kitchen, and a blanket cape feels like the appropriate armor for the occasion.
The kitchen is dark except for the under-cabinet light, casting everything in a low amber that makes the muffins on the oval tray look almost holy.
I take one, then look at the tray.
Perfectly spaced. Every muffin exactly equidistant from the next, arranged with the kind of precision that isn’t about aesthetics, that’s about something else entirely, something that lives in a person so deep they don’t even know they’re doing it.
I reach out and move one. Just slightly. An inch to the left. Off-center. Disrupting the interval.
I look at it. Move another one. Nudge a third so it’s sitting at a slight angle. Then push two together until they’re almost touching, creating a gap on the far right that shouldn’t be there.
I step back and assess my work.
Chaos. Relative chaos, anyway. Nothing dramatic—I’m not a monster—just enough disorder to make the symmetry impossible to restore without admitting you noticed it was gone.
I take a bite of the muffin.
God.Every single time.
I pull the blanket tighter and head for the stairs. I’m not going up because he told me to. I want to be clear about that—at least to myself, in the privacy of my own head at two in the morning. I’m going because the floor has made its case and lost and becausewhat kind of mistake requires meis a question I cannot answer lying on my back staring at a ceiling knot, and I need to put my body somewhere different before my brain short-circuits entirely.
That’s all this is.
I take the stairs slowly, one hand on the wall, muffin in the other, blanket trailing behind me like something I’m not quite ready to put down.
At the top, I stop. The steel door is to the right. I look at it the way I always look at it—cataloguing, measuring, the habit I can’t seem to break—and then I make myself turn left.
The door he offered is at the end of the hall next to the seasons room.
Taking another bite of the muffin, I contemplate just sleeping on the bench staring at autumn until the sun comes up. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. The room asks nothing of me. I know how it feels to be in there. I know the bench, the light, the quality of quiet it keeps. But the idea of sleeping on a bench when there’s an actual bed ten feet down the hall is the kind of stubborn I can’t justify even to myself at two in the morning.
Also, the muffin is almost gone, and once the muffin is gone, I’ll have nothing left to stall with.
I stop in front of the door, my hand resting on the handle. I could go back down. Rearrange the muffins back to their original formation, erase the evidence of my own pettiness, fold myself back into the blanket and stare at the question mark knot until morning. I’ve survived God knows how many nights on that floor. I can survive more.
I take another bite of the muffin, thinking long enough to realize I’m just too fucking tired to try to talk myself out of this, so I open the door.
The room is warm. There’s a real fireplace on the far wall, already lit—he lit it, which means he anticipated this, which means he knows my rhythms better than I want to examine right now.
I step inside, pulse lightly beating in my chest. The room is small, intentionally so. It doesn’t sprawl, it gathers. Deep charcoal walls absorb the firelight and give it back softer. A worn leather chair by the fire with a throw draped over the arm in a color I’d have chosen myself, a cherry-blossom pink, the kind that looks like spring held still.
Bookshelves flank the fireplace, filled but not curated. It has that special disorder of books that have actually been read, spines cracked, some sideways, some stacked. Titles I know. Books I’ve read and loved. And there’s a small wooden table with flowers.Freshflowers. A mix of peonies and ranunculus, sweet pea trailing between them, eucalyptus threaded through for structure—the kind of arrangement that looks uncontrived, like someone gathered them without a plan and got it right.
It’s exactlymy taste. Not approximately. Not coincidentally.
Exactly.
I stand in the middle of it and feel the first flutter of something I refuse to identify, something that lives between wonder and dread, that has no clean category, that my professional brain keeps trying to file somewhere and failing.
