Hate me harder

House rules

By the second week she had stopped being careful.

Not deliberately. It happened the way most things happened in that house — quietly, without announcement, so gradually that she only noticed it after the fact. One morning she came downstairs in her pyjamas without thinking about it and found him at the kitchen counter reading the news on his phone and neither of them made it a thing. That evening she used his name without the half-second pause she'd been putting before it. Small things. The kind of small things that added up.

The careful geography she'd constructed between herself and Ethan Black was dissolving and she wasn't doing anything to stop it and that was the part that kept her up at night.

Not him. The not stopping it.

The house had a rhythm she'd learned without trying to.

Mrs. Crane arrived Tuesdays and Fridays — a compact woman in her sixties with a no-nonsense efficiency that reminded Mara of her grandmother and a habit of leaving small things in unexpected places. Fresh flowers on the kitchen windowsill. A folded towel on the bathroom counter that hadn't been there before. Once, inexplicably, a bowl of oranges on Mara's nightstand that she hadn't asked for and ate anyway over two days.

Ethan left at eight. Returned between seven and eight. Had coffee before anything else in the morning — black, no sugar — and read the news in silence for fifteen minutes before he became available for conversation, a pattern Mara had identified by day four and respected without being asked to.

In return he had apparently identified that she needed thirty minutes of quiet after getting home from the office before she was capable of anything resembling human interaction, because he stopped asking her things during that window without her ever mentioning it.

She noticed that. She filed it under things she wasn't examining.

The first real disagreement happened on a Wednesday evening over something completely mundane.

She'd reorganized the kitchen.

Not drastically — just the cabinet above the coffee machine, which had been arranged in a way that put the things she needed most at the back behind the things she never used. She'd spent ten minutes fixing it on her lunch break and thought nothing of it until Ethan came home and opened the cabinet and stood very still for a moment.

"You moved things," he said.

"The mugs were behind the spice jars," she said without looking up from her laptop. "It didn't make sense."

A pause. "I knew where everything was."

"Now you'll know where everything is more efficiently," she said.

Another pause. Longer. She looked up. He was standing at the open cabinet with the expression of a man exercising considerable restraint.

"This is my kitchen," he said.

"I'm aware." She held his gaze. "The mugs are on the left. The coffee is in the front. You're welcome."

He closed the cabinet.

She looked back at her screen.

She heard him make his coffee — she could track the whole process by sound now, the specific sequence of it — and then he came and sat in his chair and opened his laptop and said nothing else about it.

Three days later she noticed he'd moved the mugs back.

She moved them to the left again that evening.

The next morning they were back on the right.

She looked at the cabinet for a moment. Then she made her coffee and said nothing and went to work and when she got home that evening the mugs were on the left.

She didn't mention it. He didn't mention it.

The mugs stayed on the left.

The investigation had not progressed.

She was honest with herself about that, sitting at her desk on Thursday evening while the office emptied around her. She'd hit the same walls from different directions and found them just as solid. Tobias Kane remained uncontacted. The former employees remained unreachable through conventional means. The legal angle remained airtight.

She needed help and she didn't have anyone to ask.

She pulled up her notebook — the physical one, not the digital file — and looked at her list. Four threads, all stalled. She added a fifth: Find a way in that doesn't look like looking.

She stared at that for a while.

The problem was access. Everything she needed was behind doors she couldn't open from the outside. But she wasn't on the outside anymore — she was in Ethan's office, in his building, eating breakfast in his kitchen and reorganizing his cabinets and sitting close enough to him in the evenings that she could hear him exhale when something on his screen frustrated him.

She was as inside as it was possible to get.

She just had to figure out how to use it without him seeing her do it.

She closed her notebook and packed up her things and took the car home and walked through the front door at eight-fifteen to find Ethan in the kitchen attempting something on the stove that smelled significantly better than it looked.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway.

He glanced at her over his shoulder. "Don't say anything."

She looked at the pan. At the slightly uncertain set of his shoulders. At the cookbook open on the counter — actual cookbook, spine cracked, pages marked — propped against the fruit bowl.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she said.

"You were making a face."

"This is just my face."

He turned back to the stove. She set her bag down and washed her hands at the sink and looked at the cookbook without touching it. Something with pasta. The photograph on the page looked considerably more composed than what was in the pan.

"Do you want help," she said.

A pause. "No."

She leaned against the counter and watched him for a moment — this contained, controlled man who ran a billion dollar company and negotiated boardrooms without blinking, frowning at a pan of pasta with the focused intensity he brought to everything.

"The heat's too high," she said.

He turned it down without acknowledging her.

She got two glasses from the cabinet — mugs on the left, glasses on the right, she'd left his system intact there — and poured water for both of them and set his beside the stove and took hers to the kitchen table and sat down.

They ate twenty minutes later. The pasta was slightly overdone and the sauce was better than it had any right to be given what she'd witnessed and she didn't say either of those things out loud.

"It's good," she said instead.

He looked at her across the table with the expression of a man who could tell the difference between a compliment and a kindness.

"It's average," he said.

"It's good," she said again, and meant it enough that he let it go.

They ate in the comfortable quiet that had become their evening default and outside the kitchen window the city did its nighttime thing and Mara thought about her stalled investigation and her five threads and the fact that the man sitting across from her eating average pasta was simultaneously her best resource and her biggest obstacle.

She looked at him.

He was reading something on his phone between bites — a habit she'd given up correcting him on — and the kitchen light caught the line of his jaw and the slight furrow between his brows that meant whatever he was reading required his full attention and wasn't getting it because he was eating pasta he'd cooked himself on a Wednesday evening like a person.

She looked back at her plate.

Find a way in that doesn't look like looking.

She was already in. She just hadn't decided yet what she was going to do about it.