CHAPTER NINE
905 Words
The rain came down in soft, lazy sheets, the kind that blurred the city’s edges and made the world look like it was breathing. Leah sat by the window of her apartment, knees pulled to her chest, staring at the way the streetlights fractured in the puddles below. She’d spent the last two days trying not to think about Henry.
It hadn’t worked.
His voice still lingered in her head — low, deliberate, the kind that made you listen even when you wanted to walk away. There was a weight in the way he spoke, like each word carried more than its surface meaning. And then there was the way he’d looked at her the last time they’d met: steady, unblinking, almost clinical, as if he were dissecting her without ever laying a hand on her.
Her phone buzzed.
The sound made her flinch, even though she’d been expecting it. She didn’t need to look at the screen to know.
Henry: You’ve been quiet.
No hello. No name. Just a statement, as if her silence were something he was entitled to comment on. She hesitated before typing back.
Leah: I’ve been busy.
She waited, thumb hovering, but his reply came almost instantly.
Henry: Busy with what?
Her jaw tightened. She told herself she didn’t owe him an answer. She told herself she wouldn’t give him one. And yet—
Leah: Work. Things.
It was pathetic, vague, and exactly the kind of answer that would make him push.
Henry: You were never good at lying.
Her chest tightened. The words seemed harmless on the surface, but something in them made the air in the apartment feel heavier. She typed and deleted three different responses before tossing the phone onto the couch.
She didn’t like that he was right.
The knock on the door came twenty minutes later.
She froze, pulse kicking hard in her throat. Nobody knocked at this hour, and Henry had never been to her apartment — at least, not that she knew of.
Her hand hovered over the doorknob before she forced herself to ask, “Who is it?”
Silence. Then...
“It’s raining,” Henry’s voice said through the wood.
Her breath caught.
She unlocked the door but didn’t open it all the way, letting the chain hold. He stood there, dark coat dripping, hair slightly damp, eyes sharper than the last time she’d seen them.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, tilting his head just slightly.
“I didn’t think it required one.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” His voice was calm, almost conversational, but there was an undercurrent there — the sense that he didn’t just want answers, he expected them.
“Henry, it’s late.”
“I know.” His gaze drifted past her, into the dim of her apartment, as if he could see every detail. “Are you going to let me in?”
She should have said no. She should have shut the door. Instead, she slid the chain back and stepped aside.
He moved past her with quiet precision, shedding his coat and placing it over the arm of her couch. The smell of him — cold rain, clean soap, and something darker she couldn’t name — slipped into the room with him.
“You live alone,” he said, more observation than question.
“Yes.”
“No family nearby?”
She stiffened. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” He glanced at the bookshelf in the corner, the small stack of framed photos on the top shelf. His hand hovered over one — a worn picture of her as a teenager, standing beside a man whose face was partly cut off in the frame. Henry didn’t touch it, but his mouth curved almost imperceptibly.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
Her skin prickled. “You didn’t know me then.”
A pause. “Didn’t I?”
She turned sharply toward him, but his expression was unreadable.
“What do you want, Henry?”
“I wanted to see you.” He said it without hesitation, but there was no warmth in his tone, only that measured steadiness. “And I wanted to remind you that distance doesn’t make me forget.”
“Forget what?”
He smiled — not with his eyes, just his mouth. “Anything.”
The words sat between them, heavy and sharp.
He stayed for an hour, sitting in her armchair like he owned the room, letting silences stretch too long, occasionally breaking them with questions that felt harmless until she realized how much they revealed. At some point, she stopped answering honestly. At some point, she realized she was gripping her mug so tightly her hand hurt.
When he finally stood to leave, he paused at the door. “You shouldn’t walk alone at night, Leah.”
She blinked. “I don’t—”
“You did,” he interrupted. “Thursday. Two weeks ago. Around eleven. You took the long way home.”
Her stomach dropped.
“How do you—”
But he was already stepping into the hallway, his coat back on, rain swallowing the sound of his footsteps as he disappeared.
The door clicked shut.
Leah stood there for a long time, her pulse hammering, the sound of rain loud in her ears. He shouldn’t have known that. He couldn’t have known that.
And yet, somehow, he had.
- Writer
