Chapter 2

She had been there four days and already he had a problem.

Not with her, specifically. With the situation. With the fact that the house was not as big as it had always felt before she moved in, and that the kitchen seemed to be her preferred place to exist at seven in the morning, and that she made coffee like it was a personal ritual — slow, deliberate, standing at the counter with both hands wrapped around the mug before she had even taken a sip.

Callum had started waking up earlier.

He told himself it was because he had things to do.

This particular morning he came downstairs to find her already there, sitting cross-legged on the counter in an oversized shirt and shorts, reading something on her phone. She did not hear him come in.

He could have made noise. He did not.

He watched her for approximately three seconds — which was two seconds longer than was reasonable — and then she looked up.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"You are up early," she said.

"I live here," he said.

She looked at him with that expression she had. The one that said she was deciding whether to bother responding or not. She decided not to, and looked back at her phone, and he moved to the coffee machine and tried to remember how to be a normal person.

The problem was she was right there. Close enough that he could smell whatever she used in her hair and he despised that he noticed that.

"You are sitting on the counter," he said.

"Correct," she said, not looking up.

"We eat off that counter."

She looked up then, slow and deliberate, and took a long sip of her coffee with direct eye contact.

He turned back to the machine.

He heard her exhale something that was almost a laugh and was not sure if that was better or worse.

---

The trouble with Callum, Nadia decided, was that he was inconsistent in a way that was difficult to ignore.

Cold with her at breakfast. But she had come home the previous afternoon to find he had carried her heaviest box upstairs and left it outside her door without mentioning it. She had almost said something at dinner. Then she looked at his face — perfectly neutral, not waiting for thanks, not even glancing her way — and thought better of it.

She could not figure him out and that bothered her more than the coldness did.

On day four she met his friend group properly.

There were three of them — Jasper, who talked too much and meant none of it unkindly; Priya, who had sharp eyes and said less than she knew; and Ryan, who was tall and easy and immediately turned his full attention to Nadia in a way that was obvious to everyone in the room.

"So you are the new addition," Ryan said, smiling at her from across the kitchen island.

"That is one way to say it," she said.

He laughed. "How long are you staying?"

"Permanently, technically."

"Even better."

It was harmless. Nadia knew it was harmless. Ryan had that energy — warm and a little flirtatious with everyone, the kind of person who made you feel interesting without meaning anything serious by it.

She was mid-sentence, telling him something about her course, when she felt it.

That specific feeling of being watched.

She glanced sideways without thinking.

Callum was leaning against the far counter, talking to Jasper, not looking at her.

But something in his jaw was tight.

She turned back to Ryan.

Ten minutes later Callum crossed the kitchen for no apparent reason, stopped beside her, and said to Ryan, "Didn't you say you had somewhere to be at three?"

Ryan blinked. "Did I?"

"You did," Callum said. Very calm. Completely certain.

Ryan looked at his phone, shrugged, and eventually the conversation drifted somewhere else and Nadia found herself no longer talking to Ryan at all.

She stared at the side of Callum's face.

He did not look at her.

Later, when everyone had moved to the living room and she was alone in the kitchen refilling her glass, he came back in.

"Did you just do that on purpose?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"You know what."

He leaned against the counter and looked at her with that unbothered expression she was beginning to find genuinely infuriating.

"Ryan talks a lot," he said. "I was saving you the trouble."

"I did not ask to be saved."

"Noted," he said.

He pushed off the counter and walked back out.

Nadia stood there for a moment, glass in hand, feeling a kind of irritation that was warm at the edges in a way it absolutely should not have been.

She put that thought away immediately.

---

That night Callum sat on the roof outside his window — something he had done since he was seventeen whenever the inside of his head got too loud — and called Marcus.

"She has been there four days," Marcus said.

"I am aware."

"And?"

"And nothing. It is fine."

Marcus was quiet for a second. "You are on the roof, aren't you."

Callum said nothing.

"Cal. You only go on the roof when something is eating you."

"It is a nice night."

"It is literally cloudy."

Callum looked up. It was, in fact, completely overcast.

"Go to sleep, Marcus," he said.

"You should talk to her. Just — tell her you know her. From before."

"There is nothing to tell."

"You thought about that girl for a year."

"Goodnight, Marcus."

He hung up and sat in the grey dark and listened to the house below him. A light was still on in her room. He could see the thin line of it under the gap at the bottom of her curtains from where he sat.

He stayed out there longer than he needed to.

He told himself it was the fresh air.

---

The next morning she found her favourite coffee — the specific one she had brought from her old house, tucked at the back of the cupboard — moved to the front shelf.

Right at eye level. Easy to reach.

She stood there looking at it for a moment.

Then she made her coffee and sat on the counter and did not say a word about it.

But she thought about it for the rest of the day.

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