THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Chapter Three: Thin Walls

The pipe under Ada's kitchen sink began leaking on a Saturday morning, three weeks after Emeka moved in — the same week Origin Studio finally won the mixed-use development pitch, after Ada's fourth rebuild of the massing model turned out to be the one that convinced the client. She'd celebrated by working straight through the following Saturday morning, catching up on the small tasks she'd let slide during the push, and had just sat down with her first coffee of the day when she noticed it. She noticed it when she stepped in a puddle in her socks, cursed loudly enough that it probably carried through the wall, and called the building's maintenance line, which rang twice and went to voicemail, as it always did on weekends.

She was on her knees with a bucket and a roll of paper towels, trying to remember which of the pipes she was supposed to shut off and cursing the fact that she, an architect, could design an entire building and still not know how her own kitchen worked, when there was a knock at her door.

"I heard cursing through the wall," Emeka said, when she opened it, dripping. "Figured either you were fighting with someone, or you had a plumbing problem. The second one seemed more likely, given your general disposition."

"My general disposition is fine," Ada said, but she stepped aside anyway, because she had exhausted her plumbing knowledge and pride was a poor substitute for a working sink.

He fixed it in twenty minutes, with tools he apparently kept in his own apartment for exactly this kind of emergency, which told her something about who he'd become — steadier, more practical, someone who showed up prepared instead of someone who needed things done for him. She remembered him at nineteen, hopeless with anything mechanical, unable even to fix a bicycle chain without help, and found herself watching him now with something close to fascination, cross-legged on her own kitchen floor, chin propped on her hand.

"When did you learn to do this?" she asked, handing him a towel for his hands.

"You pick things up, living alone in a foreign country for ten years," he said. "Nobody's coming to fix your pipes for you. You either learn, or you live with a bucket under your sink."

"Is that a metaphor?"

"Everything's a metaphor if you're tired enough," he said, and she laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh, the kind she didn't let out very often, the kind that surprised her almost as much as it seemed to please him.

After that, it became a pattern, though neither of them called it one. He fixed a loose cabinet hinge the following week, uninvited but not unwelcome, letting himself in with the spare key she'd handed over almost without thinking about it. She returned the favor by leaving a plate of food outside his door when she noticed he'd been working late — she told herself it was simple courtesy, the kind any decent neighbor would extend, though she never left food for anyone else in the building. He started leaving his door open when he was home, which she noticed more than she wanted to admit, and began, without deciding to, checking whether it was open every time she came down the hallway.

Their mothers, who had stayed close over the years despite their children's estrangement, began engineering reasons for the two families to be in the same place. A cousin's naming ceremony. A church anniversary. A Sunday lunch that Ada's mother insisted Ada attend, though she rarely pushed that hard about anything, which should have told Ada something on its own.

At the naming ceremony, Ada watched Emeka across the compound, laughing with his uncles, holding a baby with the easy confidence of someone who had done it a hundred times, and felt something shift in her chest that she didn't have a name for yet. Chiamaka, standing beside her, followed her gaze and smirked.

"You're staring," Chiamaka said.

"I'm not staring."

"Ada. You're staring so hard I'm surprised he hasn't caught fire."

Ada looked away, annoyed at how quickly the heat rose in her face. "We're neighbors. That's all this is."

"Sure," Chiamaka said, in the tone of someone who did not believe a single word of it, and went to get more jollof rice, leaving Ada alone with the uncomfortable feeling that her sister was right.

Later that evening, driving Ada home, Chiamaka turned the radio down at a red light and said, more seriously than usual, "You know it's allowed, right? To let someone matter to you. Papa leaving didn't mean you're required to stay alone forever as punishment for a decision that wasn't yours."

"I don't do that," Ada said automatically.

"You do exactly that," Chiamaka said, and didn't push further, letting the silence sit between them the rest of the way home, which was somehow worse than if she'd kept arguing.