Chapter 3

By the end of the first week Nadia had a system.

Avoid the hallway between seven and seven thirty because that was when he came out of his room looking like sleep had not quite finished with him yet and he was somehow worse like that — less guarded, quieter, the sharp edges of him softened in a way that was inconvenient to witness.

Avoid the living room after ten at night because he had a habit of sitting there in the dark with just the lamp on, reading or on his phone, and the house got too quiet at that hour and quiet made her notice things she preferred not to notice.

The kitchen in the morning was unavoidable. She had accepted that.

Everything else she could manage.

She was doing well, she thought. Considering.

Then Saturday happened.

---

Saturdays, she learned, were when the house filled up.

Daniel had his own friends. Her mother had already made friends with two women from the street. And Callum's people drifted in and out with the ease of people who had been doing it for years — Jasper first, then Priya, then Ryan again, who came in through the back door without knocking like he had done it a thousand times.

Nadia was in the garden when Ryan found her.

She had discovered a small corner near the back wall where someone had left an old wooden chair and she had claimed it quietly as hers, sitting there with her book and the late morning sun.

Ryan dropped into the grass beside her without being invited, which she found she did not actually mind.

"What are you reading?" he asked.

She showed him the cover.

"Any good?"

"It is the third time I have read it so yes."

He grinned. He had an easy grin, uncomplicated in a way that was genuinely pleasant after a week of trying to decode Callum's expressions. They talked for a while — nothing heavy, nothing loaded, just two people passing time in a garden on a Saturday.

She had almost relaxed completely when the back door opened.

She did not have to look up to know who it was. She felt it.

Callum came out with two drinks, handed one to Ryan without being asked, and then looked down at Nadia's empty hand.

A pause.

"Do you want one?" he asked.

"I am fine," she said.

He went back inside.

He came back two minutes later with a glass and set it on the arm of her chair without a word and sat down in the grass on her other side and said something to Ryan about something she was not listening to because she was staring at the glass he had just placed beside her hand.

She had not asked.

He had not explained.

She drank it and said nothing.

---

Ryan left first.

Before he did he stopped beside Nadia's chair and said, "We should do something next weekend. A few of us, maybe."

"Maybe," she said.

"I will text you." He glanced at Callum. "I'll get her number from you."

"I will give it to him myself," Nadia said pleasantly.

Ryan laughed, took her number from her directly, and left through the side gate.

The garden went quiet.

Priya had gone inside. Jasper was somewhere in the house. It was just the two of them and the sound of someone's lawnmower three gardens over.

"You do not have to go everywhere he suggests," Callum said.

His voice was easy. Conversational. Like he was commenting on the weather.

Nadia turned her head and looked at him.

"Excuse me?"

"Ryan is a good person," he said. "He is also someone who loses interest quickly. I am just telling you so you know."

She stared at him.

"You are unbelievable," she said.

He looked back at her with that perfectly level expression. "I am looking out for you."

"I did not ask you to look out for me."

"No," he agreed. "You did not."

"Then stop."

He said nothing. Just looked at her in that way he had — like he was listening to something she was not actually saying.

She got up and went inside and did not look back.

---

She found Priya in the kitchen, which was convenient because Priya was exactly the kind of person Nadia needed right then — observant, direct, and unlikely to sugarcoat anything.

"Can I ask you something?" Nadia said.

Priya looked up from her phone. "You want to know about Callum."

Nadia blinked. "Is it that obvious?"

"You have that specific face people get." Priya set her phone down. "What did he do?"

"He told me Ryan loses interest quickly. Out of nowhere. Like it was a public service announcement."

Priya was quiet for a moment.

"What?" Nadia said.

"Nothing."

"That is not a nothing face."

Priya picked her phone back up. "Callum does not usually comment on who his friends talk to."

"Well he commented on me."

"Yes," Priya said simply. "He did."

She did not say anything else and Nadia had the distinct feeling she was being given information without being given information, which was somehow more frustrating than knowing nothing at all.

---

That night Nadia could not sleep.

She lay in the dark and replayed the garden and the glass on the arm of her chair and the way he had sat beside her without being asked and the way his jaw had gone tight when Ryan smiled at her and she thought about all of it in a loop until she was exhausted and annoyed at herself for thinking about it at all.

She got up for water around midnight.

The hallway was dark. She moved quietly, not wanting to wake anyone.

She was halfway down the stairs when she heard it — music, low and almost inaudible, coming from the living room.

She stopped.

She should have kept walking.

She did not.

She leaned just slightly past the wall and looked.

He was on the couch in the dark, one lamp on, and he was not reading and he was not on his phone. He was just sitting there. Still in a way he never was during the day. Like the version of him that existed at midnight was a different person entirely — quieter, less constructed, something underneath the composure finally allowed to breathe.

She watched him for four seconds.

Then she went and got her water and went back upstairs without making a sound.

She sat on the edge of her bed and thought about his face in the lamplight and how it looked like someone who was carrying something he was not telling anyone about.

She told herself it was not her business.

She also did not sleep for another hour.

---

Down the hall, Callum turned the music off and sat in the silence.

He had not heard her on the stairs.

But he had felt the shift in the house that happened when she was nearby — some subtle change in the air that he hated himself a little for recognizing.

He put his head back against the couch.

Three weeks ago his life had been uncomplicated.

He was going to need a better system.

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