Hate me harder

His roof

She woke up not knowing where she was.

That specific disorientation — ceiling wrong, light wrong, the sounds of the building unfamiliar — lasted about four seconds before everything came back. The smoke. The ladder. The foil blanket. The black sedan moving through the city in the dark with Ethan Black sitting beside her saying nothing in exactly the right way.

She sat up slowly.

The guest room looked different in daylight. Warmer. The curtains were a deep charcoal and the morning light came through the gap between them in a clean pale stripe across the floor. The bed was the kind of comfortable that felt almost offensive given the circumstances — she'd slept deeply and without dreaming, which was either a testament to exhaustion or to something about this house that she wasn't going to examine.

She checked her phone. Seven fourteen. Three missed calls from Priya, a message from Jay that said heard what happened call me when you're up, and a building management notification about access procedures for fire-damaged properties that she closed immediately because she wasn't ready for that yet.

She found a toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet exactly where he'd said it would be. The shirt in the top drawer was dark navy, soft from washing, large enough that it hit her mid-thigh. She stood in the bathroom mirror for a moment and looked at herself in it and had a feeling she couldn't name and chose not to try.

She smelled coffee before she reached the bottom of the stairs.

The kitchen was at the back of the house — open, quiet, morning light coming through a window above the sink. Ethan was already there, standing at the counter with a cup in one hand and his phone in the other, dressed for work already, jacket on. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway.

His eyes moved over her briefly — just a glance, taking in the navy shirt, the bare feet on his kitchen floor — and then back to his phone without comment.

"Coffee's fresh," he said.

She found a mug in the cabinet above the machine and poured herself a cup and stood at the opposite end of the counter and they existed in the same space without talking for a moment, which should have been strange and wasn't quite.

"How are you feeling," he said. Not really a question. More like an acknowledgement.

"Fine," she said automatically.

He looked at her over his coffee cup with an expression that said he knew what fine meant when someone said it that way.

"Sore throat," she admitted. "From the smoke."

He opened a cabinet and set a box of throat lozenges on the counter between them without a word. She looked at them. Then at him.

"You keep throat lozenges in your kitchen," she said.

"My housekeeper is thorough."

She took one and unwrapped it and he went back to his phone and she looked around the kitchen properly for the first time. It was the kind of space that revealed things about a person. There were actual books on the small shelf beside the window — not decorative ones, read ones, spines creased and pages slightly swollen. A coffee machine that was expensive but not showy. A fruit bowl with things actually in it. A handwritten note stuck to the fridge in someone else's handwriting that said milk and the good bread underlined twice.

It was a lived-in house. She hadn't expected that.

"I need to go back to the flat today," she said. "The management company sent a notice about access."

"I'll have someone go with you," he said. "For the photograph."

She looked at him. "You don't have to do that."

"I know." He set his phone down and picked up his keys. "Clara will arrange a car for you this morning. Whatever you need from the flat that's salvageable — make a list and someone will help you get it out."

She wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at him standing in his kitchen in his pressed jacket with his keys in his hand and felt the strange doubled quality of the moment — this man who had walked into her building two weeks ago and dismantled her life was now standing in his kitchen making sure she had a car and a throat lozenge and someone to help her retrieve her mother's photograph.

She didn't know what to do with him when he was like this.

"About staying here," she said carefully.

He looked at her.

"I'll find a hotel by the end of the week," she said. "I'm not — I don't intend to make this a permanent arrangement."

"The flat won't be habitable for at least three weeks," he said. "Possibly four depending on the structural assessment."

"I'm aware. I'll sort something."

He studied her for a moment with that focused unhurried attention. "The room is empty," he said simply. "It costs me nothing. Sort something if you want to but don't do it out of pride."

She opened her mouth.

"And before you tell me it's not about pride," he said, "it's clearly about pride."

She closed her mouth.

He picked up his coffee cup and rinsed it at the sink with the efficiency of someone who did it the same way every morning and set it on the drying rack and straightened his jacket.

"I leave at eight," he said. "The car will take us both."

He walked out of the kitchen.

She stood at the counter with her coffee and her throat lozenge and the quiet of his house around her and looked at the note on the fridge. Milk and the good bread. Underlined twice.

She thought about pride.

Then she thought about three weeks in a hotel with her investigation stalled and her team unsettled and her mother's photograph still sitting on a smoke-damaged bedside table.

She finished her coffee.

She was in the car at eight.

They rode to the office in the same silence they'd managed the night before — not uncomfortable, just parallel. She looked out her window. He looked at his phone. The city moved past in its morning register, purposeful and indifferent.

At a red light he said, without looking up, "There's a spare key on the hook by the front door. Use it."

She looked at him. He was still reading his phone.

"You're giving me a key to your house," she said.

"It's practical," he said. "You'll be coming and going at different times. I'm not going to leave a key with the housekeeper every morning."

The light changed. The car moved.

She looked back out her window and said nothing and tried very hard to treat it as the practical arrangement he was describing and not as the thing it felt like, which was something she didn't have a clean word for.

The car pulled up outside the office building. They got out on opposite sides. He was already moving toward the entrance when she came around the car and fell into step beside him — not intentionally, just the natural geometry of two people going the same direction.

The doorman held the door. They walked through.

In the lobby he peeled off toward the elevators without breaking stride. She headed for the stairs the way she always did.

"Mara."

She stopped and looked back.

He was standing at the elevator, hand holding the door. He looked at her with that expression she was beginning to catalog — the one that appeared briefly and left quickly and carried something in it she hadn't decoded yet.

"The throat lozenges are in the top left cabinet," he said. "At home. In case you need them tonight."

The elevator closed.

She stood in the lobby for a moment.

At home. He'd said it without thinking. Like it already was.

She turned and took the stairs and told herself firmly that it meant nothing, that he was a practical man who used practical language, that she was reading into things because she was tired and displaced and emotionally raw from last night.

She almost believed it.

Almost.