Mia Harper had exactly one rule for a good morning: there was no such thing as morning.
Mornings were a myth invented by people who owned blazers and drank black coffee out of thermoses shaped like rocket ships. Mia's mornings began somewhere around eleven, sometimes noon if the previous night's illustration deadline had bled past three a.m., which it usually did. Her bedroom -- if you could call a converted studio apartment corner with a mattress on a low wooden frame a bedroom -- was a nest of half-finished sketches, drying paintbrushes standing bristle-up in a chipped mug, and a scatter of tarot cards from the reading she'd given herself the night before. The Tower had come up twice. She'd decided not to think about that.
She was deep in a dream about a golden retriever who could talk in iambic pentameter when the world exploded.
Not literally. It felt literal. It felt like the wall behind her headboard had personally decided to detonate.
BRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRT.
Mia's eyes flew open. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she nearly rolled off the mattress. The sound came again, a high, grinding whine that vibrated through the drywall and straight into her molars -- a power drill, unmistakably, and unmistakably right on the other side of the wall she shared with apartment 4B.
She lay there for a full three seconds, willing it to be a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and too much oat milk. It was not a hallucination. It drilled again, longer this time, like it was personally offended by her attempt at rest.
"Oh, come on," she groaned into her pillow.
She grabbed her phone off the floor -- because nightstands were for people with their lives together -- and squinted at the screen. 6:04 AM glowed back at her in smug, merciless digits.
Six. Zero. Four.
Mia had not willingly witnessed six a.m. since a college ex had dragged her to watch a meteor shower, and even then she'd fallen asleep in the car before the meteors showed up. Six a.m. was not a time. It was a rumor. And someone on the other side of her bedroom wall was currently defiling it with power tools.
The drill screamed again. Something heavy thudded against the shared wall -- a shelf bracket, maybe, or a body, she genuinely could not rule it out at this point -- and a small framed print of a fox she'd hung there in a fit of feng shui optimism tilted sideways and slid off its nail entirely, clattering onto her desk and knocking over a jar of water she'd been using to rinse paintbrushes. Gray-tinged water spread in a slow, ominous lake across three days of unfinished linework.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
Mia was out of bed before she'd fully processed the decision to get out of bed, snatching her cardigan off the floor and yanking it over the oversized t-shirt she'd slept in, which read WITCH, PLEASE in cracked iron-on letters. She didn't bother with pants beyond the leggings already tangled around one ankle. This was not a pants-required conversation. This was a war footing.
She stormed out of her apartment and into the hallway, where the drilling sound was somehow even louder, bouncing off the beige carpet and beige walls of a building that had clearly been designed by someone who hated color and joy. The door to 4B -- which had sat empty for the two blissful months since the previous tenant, a quiet retired librarian named Doris, had moved to Arizona -- stood wide open. Boxes were stacked in the hallway outside it, taped shut and labeled in painfully neat block capitals: KITCHEN — FRAGILE. BOOKS (MEDICAL). GYM EQUIPMENT.
Gym equipment. At 6 a.m. Of course.
Mia marched through the open door without knocking, because knocking implied a level of civility she did not currently possess, and found herself in a living room that was, impossibly, already more organized than her apartment had ever been in the two years she'd lived in this building. There were no boxes inside -- they'd apparently all been unpacked with terrifying efficiency -- just a single leather sofa positioned with geometric precision against one wall, a stack of hardcover books arranged by height on a low shelf, and, standing on a small stepladder with a cordless drill in one hand and a level in the other, a man.
He was tall -- tall enough that even on the ladder he had to duck slightly to avoid the ceiling fixture -- with the kind of build that suggested he did not consider "cardio" a punishment but a lifestyle. He wore a plain gray t-shirt that had ridden up slightly at the hip as he reached to steady the metal bracket he was mounting to the wall, and dark athletic shorts, and his hair -- dark, short, deliberately unfussy -- was still damp, like he'd already been somewhere and come back and this, apparently, was his second activity of the morning. A stopwatch sat on the side table next to a water bottle with measurement lines on it. There was a folded gym towel draped over the sofa arm like a throw pillow.
He hadn't noticed her yet. He was fully absorbed in getting the bracket level, checking the small bubble in his level with the kind of focus most people reserved for defusing bombs.
"Excuse me," Mia said, in a voice that came out significantly louder and significantly more unhinged than she'd intended.
He turned. And blinked. There was a beat -- just one -- where his eyes flicked over her: bedhead, mismatched socks, water-stained cardigan, WITCH PLEASE shirt, one leg of leggings pushed up to the knee for reasons neither of them would ever discuss -- and something crossed his face that was not quite alarm and not quite amusement, but adjacent to both.
"Can I help you?" he said. His voice was low, even, unbothered -- the voice of a man who had never once in his life been late to anything.
"You can help me by not drilling through my skull at six in the morning," Mia said. "I share that wall. I was asleep. I am still, spiritually, asleep."
He set the drill down on the stepladder tray with a care that somehow annoyed her more than if he'd dropped it. "I apologize if the noise carried. I'm mounting equipment brackets. I try to get non-essential tasks done before six-thirty, before my first client."
"Your first client."
"I'm a personal trainer. Part-time. And a veterinarian, full-time, at the clinic on Fremont." He said this like it explained everything, like it was self-evident that a man who fixed broken dogs by day and trained abs by dawn would obviously also consider six a.m. drilling to be a reasonable, even generous, compromise with the rest of humanity.
"Great. Fascinating. None of that changes the fact that a fox painting just fell off my wall and drowned in paint water because of you."
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth -- not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one that he'd decided, on principle, not to let out. "That sounds like a structural issue with your nail placement, not my drilling."
Mia stared at him. "Did you just -- did you just blame my nail placement?"
"I'm stating a fact. Improperly anchored hardware is a common cause of wall-mounted item failure." He said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, like he was reading off a pamphlet, that for one disorienting second Mia wondered if this was an elaborate prank. Nobody talked like that. Nobody real talked like that.
"Okay," she said, holding up both hands. "New rule. You do not get to psychoanalyze my nail placement at six a.m. while power-tooling through drywall like you're building a bunker. Some of us have irregular schedules. Some of us work at night."
"Some of us have patients at seven," he said. "Animals don't wait for people to wake up on their own schedule."
"Well, neither do drills, apparently, so I guess we're even."
He tilted his head slightly, studying her the way she imagined he studied a dog that had come in limping and hadn't decided yet whether to bite him. "I'll try to keep the noise contained to the far wall going forward. That's the best I can offer before six-thirty."
"That's not an apology."
"It's a solution. Solutions are generally more useful than apologies." He picked the drill back up, an unmistakable signal that as far as he was concerned, this conversation had reached its natural, efficient conclusion.
Mia opened her mouth to say something devastating and found, infuriatingly, that nothing devastating arrived. She settled for, "You're going to be a delightful neighbor," in a tone that made abundantly clear she meant the opposite.
"Lucas," he said, unexpectedly, just as she reached the door.
She turned back, thrown. "What?"
"My name. Since we're apparently going to be doing this regularly." There was something almost wry in the way he said it, a flicker of dry humor she hadn't expected from a man who spoke about hardware anchoring like scripture. "Lucas Vance."
"I don't need your name to file a noise complaint," Mia said, which was not remotely true, but felt important to say.
"No," he agreed. "But it's generally considered polite to know the name of the person you're threatening with paperwork."
Despite herself, despite the water damage and the six a.m. of it all, Mia felt the corner of her mouth twitch. She smashed the feeling down before it could go anywhere. "Mia," she said, grudgingly, like the word cost her something. "Harper."
"Mia Harper." He said it the way he'd said improperly anchored hardware -- like he was filing it away somewhere precise and permanent, a little index card in an internal system she suspected was alphabetized. "I really will try to keep the noise on the far wall, going forward."
"Sure you will."
"I mean it."
"I'm sure you mean everything you say, Lucas Vance. That's almost the problem." She didn't wait to see what he made of that; she turned on her heel to leave, nearly tripping over one of his perfectly labeled boxes on the way out. GYM EQUIPMENT wobbled but did not fall. Of course it didn't. Even his boxes had better balance than she did at six a.m.
She slammed her own door behind her -- immensely satisfying, structurally probably unwise given the state of the walls in this building -- and stood in the middle of her ruined studio, breathing hard, adrenaline and indignation running hot through her veins.
"Unbelievable," she muttered, surveying the damage. The fox print lay face-up in a puddle of gray water, a corner of the frame warped. She picked it up gingerly and set it on the windowsill to dry, dabbing uselessly at the glass with the hem of her cardigan.
She thought about marching to the building manager's office the second it opened and filing a formal noise complaint, the kind with bullet points, the kind that used the phrase "hostile living environment." She got as far as opening the notes app on her phone and typing Re: Noise Disturbance, Apt 4B before her thumb hovered, uncertain, over the keyboard, and the fight drained out of her as quickly as it had arrived. Filing a complaint required going downstairs before noon, dealing with Gary from the front office who took forty-five minutes to fill out any form, and possibly having to see the drill guy again in a professional capacity, which felt, for reasons she didn't examine too closely, worse than just being annoyed at him privately.
"Whatever," she said out loud, to no one. "Not worth the paperwork."
She deleted the note and, instead, opened her group chat with Priya, her one friend who was reliably awake at ungodly hours because she worked night shifts at the hospital downtown.
MIA: new neighbor moved in. drilled through my wall at 6am. blamed my art for falling off ITS OWN nail. also somehow already has abs and a stopwatch
PRIYA: a stopwatch. for what
MIA: EXACTLY. for WHAT. who owns a stopwatch that isn't a swim coach or a war criminal
PRIYA: is he hot
MIA: that is not the point
PRIYA: it's a little bit the point
MIA: he called my nail placement a structural issue. i almost threw my phone at him
PRIYA: so. hot then
Mia typed out a furious string of exclamation points, deleted them, and set the phone face-down on the desk, because Priya was, infuriatingly, not entirely wrong, and Mia did not have the emotional bandwidth at eight in the morning to examine that further. The man had been objectively, almost aggressively, put-together -- symmetrical in a way that felt almost rude before nine a.m. -- but that had nothing to do with anything. Handsome people could still be insufferable. In her experience, they often were.
Instead she flopped face-down onto her unmade bed, breathing in the familiar smell of turpentine and old coffee that lived permanently in her sheets, and tried to recapture the talking-golden-retriever dream. It didn't come back. What came back, unbidden and unwelcome, was the image of the man on the stepladder -- the absurd, clinical calm of him, the way he'd said improperly anchored hardware like it was a personality trait he was proud of, the way his eyes had done that quick, involuntary once-over of her ridiculous six a.m. outfit before he'd very deliberately schooled his expression back into professional neutrality.
She didn't know his name. She hadn't asked. It felt important, suddenly, that she didn't know his name, like not knowing it kept him safely categorized as An Obstacle rather than A Person.
"Doesn't matter," she told the ceiling. "I'll never speak to Doctor Drill Sergeant again in my life."
She was wrong, of course, though she wouldn't find out how wrong for another forty minutes.
By eight, she'd given up on sleep entirely and dragged herself to her drafting table instead, mug of reheated coffee steaming beside a stack of reference photos for the children's book illustration project that was due in nine days and roughly sixty percent finished. She pulled up the file -- a fox character mid-leap over a stream, the same fox from the ruined print, actually, an earlier study she'd done for the same series -- and lost herself, gradually, in the particular meditative quiet of pencil on paper. This was the version of morning she could tolerate: soft light through the blinds, the hush of a Saturday building slowly waking up around her, no drills, no six a.m. anything.
Every so often, despite herself, she found her gaze drifting toward the shared wall. Nothing. Silence. Maybe he'd finished his bracket-mounting reign of terror. Maybe he'd left for his seven o'clock patient and his six-thirty client and whatever other absurdly disciplined activities filled a man's day when he considered improperly anchored hardware a moral failing.
She was three-quarters of the way through inking the fox's tail when she heard it: a soft, deliberate thump against her window, followed by the unmistakable scrabbling sound of claws on metal.
Mia looked up just in time to see a gray blur launch itself from the neighboring balcony railing, sail through the six inches of open space at the bottom of her cracked window, and land -- with a solidity that suggested significant mass -- directly in the middle of her reference photos, scattering fox studies across the floor like startled birds.
It was, she registered slowly, a cat. A very large, very round, silver-gray cat with a flat, unimpressed face and the kind of dense, plush coat that looked like it had been styled by a professional. It sat in the wreckage of her workspace and looked up at her with pale gold eyes that conveyed, with startling clarity, the sentiment: yes, and?
"Um," Mia said. "Hello?"
The cat did not answer, on account of being a cat, but it did stand, stretch with theatrical slowness, and pad directly across her desk -- knocking a jar of pencils to the floor with a single unbothered swipe of its tail -- before hopping down onto her bed and turning three tight circles atop her pillow, kneading it with obvious proprietary intent.
"That's -- that's my pillow," Mia said, standing up. "That is specifically my area."
The cat settled, tucked its paws beneath its chest like a loaf of bread, and closed its eyes with the serene finality of a creature that had already decided, unilaterally, that this negotiation was over.
Mia stood in the middle of her studio -- fox studies scattered across the floor, coffee cooling on the desk, a strange cat colonizing her pillow with the confidence of a small, furry emperor -- and felt the distinct, dawning sensation that this six a.m. wake-up call had been less an isolated incident and more of an opening move.
She had a feeling, looking at the cat, and beyond it, at the wall that separated her apartment from 4B, that this was only the beginning.
She crouched slowly beside the bed, studying the intruder with the wary curiosity of someone examining an unexploded firework. Up close, the cat was even more absurd than she'd first registered -- a dense, silvery coat that looked plush enough to sink a hand into, a face so flat and round it seemed permanently unimpressed with the entire concept of mornings, and a body with the unmistakable, well-fed silhouette of an animal who had never once in its life missed a meal. There was no collar. No tag. Just an air of profound, unshakeable entitlement, as if the cat had taken one look at the building, done a brief survey of available real estate, and decided Mia's pillow represented the superior investment.
"You're not supposed to be here," she told it, in the low, useless voice people use on animals and toddlers who very clearly do not care. "This is a whole thing. You realize that, right? You've crossed state lines. There are borders."
The cat's ear twitched. One golden eye cracked open, regarded her with what could only be described as profound indifference, and closed again.
"Okay," Mia said. "Cool. Great talk."
She reached out, tentative, and laid two fingers against the impossibly soft fur behind one round ear. The cat did not wake, did not protest, merely exhaled a long, rattling breath through its nose and pressed its head, fractionally, into her hand -- an unconscious, involuntary little lean, like it had decided, somewhere in its small feline brain, that this was an acceptable arrangement after all.
Something in Mia's chest did an unexpected, traitorous little flip. She had wanted, for the entirety of this conversation, to be furious -- at the drilling, at the ruined fox print, at the smug, symmetrical man next door with his stopwatch and his opinions about nail placement -- and instead she found herself sitting on the floor beside her own bed at eight-thirty in the morning, quietly falling in love with a cat that had broken into her apartment and colonized her pillow without so much as an introduction.
"This changes nothing," she informed the cat, who was already snoring, in the specific, wet little snuffle of a very fat, very content animal. "I still hate your owner."
The cat did not dignify this with a response. Outside, faintly, through the thin apartment wall, Mia thought she heard a door open -- and then, unmistakably, a low, controlled, increasingly frantic voice calling a name she didn't yet know, up and down the hallway, again and again, like a man discovering, for the first time in his extremely organized life, that not everything could be scheduled, labeled, or kept inside the lines.
She smiled, despite herself, and did not, for several long, satisfying minutes, get up to tell him where his cat had gone.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Mia Harper had exactly one rule for a good morning: there was no such thing as morning.
Mornings were a myth invented by people who owned blazers and drank black coffee out of thermoses shaped like rocket ships. Mia's mornings began somewhere around eleven, sometimes noon if the previous night's illustration deadline had bled past three a.m., which it usually did. Her bedroom -- if you could call a converted studio apartment corner with a mattress on a low wooden frame a bedroom -- was a nest of half-finished sketches, drying paintbrushes standing bristle-up in a chipped mug, and a scatter of tarot cards from the reading she'd given herself the night before. The Tower had come up twice. She'd decided not to think about that.
She was deep in a dream about a golden retriever who could talk in iambic pentameter when the world exploded.
Not literally. It felt literal. It felt like the wall behind her headboard had personally decided to detonate.
BRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRT. BRRRRRRT.
Mia's eyes flew open. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she nearly rolled off the mattress. The sound came again, a high, grinding whine that vibrated through the drywall and straight into her molars -- a power drill, unmistakably, and unmistakably right on the other side of the wall she shared with apartment 4B.
She lay there for a full three seconds, willing it to be a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and too much oat milk. It was not a hallucination. It drilled again, longer this time, like it was personally offended by her attempt at rest.
"Oh, come on," she groaned into her pillow.
She grabbed her phone off the floor -- because nightstands were for people with their lives together -- and squinted at the screen. 6:04 AM glowed back at her in smug, merciless digits.
Six. Zero. Four.
Mia had not willingly witnessed six a.m. since a college ex had dragged her to watch a meteor shower, and even then she'd fallen asleep in the car before the meteors showed up. Six a.m. was not a time. It was a rumor. And someone on the other side of her bedroom wall was currently defiling it with power tools.
The drill screamed again. Something heavy thudded against the shared wall -- a shelf bracket, maybe, or a body, she genuinely could not rule it out at this point -- and a small framed print of a fox she'd hung there in a fit of feng shui optimism tilted sideways and slid off its nail entirely, clattering onto her desk and knocking over a jar of water she'd been using to rinse paintbrushes. Gray-tinged water spread in a slow, ominous lake across three days of unfinished linework.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
Mia was out of bed before she'd fully processed the decision to get out of bed, snatching her cardigan off the floor and yanking it over the oversized t-shirt she'd slept in, which read WITCH, PLEASE in cracked iron-on letters. She didn't bother with pants beyond the leggings already tangled around one ankle. This was not a pants-required conversation. This was a war footing.
She stormed out of her apartment and into the hallway, where the drilling sound was somehow even louder, bouncing off the beige carpet and beige walls of a building that had clearly been designed by someone who hated color and joy. The door to 4B -- which had sat empty for the two blissful months since the previous tenant, a quiet retired librarian named Doris, had moved to Arizona -- stood wide open. Boxes were stacked in the hallway outside it, taped shut and labeled in painfully neat block capitals: KITCHEN — FRAGILE. BOOKS (MEDICAL). GYM EQUIPMENT.
Gym equipment. At 6 a.m. Of course.
Mia marched through the open door without knocking, because knocking implied a level of civility she did not currently possess, and found herself in a living room that was, impossibly, already more organized than her apartment had ever been in the two years she'd lived in this building. There were no boxes inside -- they'd apparently all been unpacked with terrifying efficiency -- just a single leather sofa positioned with geometric precision against one wall, a stack of hardcover books arranged by height on a low shelf, and, standing on a small stepladder with a cordless drill in one hand and a level in the other, a man.
He was tall -- tall enough that even on the ladder he had to duck slightly to avoid the ceiling fixture -- with the kind of build that suggested he did not consider "cardio" a punishment but a lifestyle. He wore a plain gray t-shirt that had ridden up slightly at the hip as he reached to steady the metal bracket he was mounting to the wall, and dark athletic shorts, and his hair -- dark, short, deliberately unfussy -- was still damp, like he'd already been somewhere and come back and this, apparently, was his second activity of the morning. A stopwatch sat on the side table next to a water bottle with measurement lines on it. There was a folded gym towel draped over the sofa arm like a throw pillow.
He hadn't noticed her yet. He was fully absorbed in getting the bracket level, checking the small bubble in his level with the kind of focus most people reserved for defusing bombs.
"Excuse me," Mia said, in a voice that came out significantly louder and significantly more unhinged than she'd intended.
He turned. And blinked. There was a beat -- just one -- where his eyes flicked over her: bedhead, mismatched socks, water-stained cardigan, WITCH PLEASE shirt, one leg of leggings pushed up to the knee for reasons neither of them would ever discuss -- and something crossed his face that was not quite alarm and not quite amusement, but adjacent to both.
"Can I help you?" he said. His voice was low, even, unbothered -- the voice of a man who had never once in his life been late to anything.
"You can help me by not drilling through my skull at six in the morning," Mia said. "I share that wall. I was asleep. I am still, spiritually, asleep."
He set the drill down on the stepladder tray with a care that somehow annoyed her more than if he'd dropped it. "I apologize if the noise carried. I'm mounting equipment brackets. I try to get non-essential tasks done before six-thirty, before my first client."
"Your first client."
"I'm a personal trainer. Part-time. And a veterinarian, full-time, at the clinic on Fremont." He said this like it explained everything, like it was self-evident that a man who fixed broken dogs by day and trained abs by dawn would obviously also consider six a.m. drilling to be a reasonable, even generous, compromise with the rest of humanity.
"Great. Fascinating. None of that changes the fact that a fox painting just fell off my wall and drowned in paint water because of you."
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth -- not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one that he'd decided, on principle, not to let out. "That sounds like a structural issue with your nail placement, not my drilling."
Mia stared at him. "Did you just -- did you just blame my nail placement?"
"I'm stating a fact. Improperly anchored hardware is a common cause of wall-mounted item failure." He said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, like he was reading off a pamphlet, that for one disorienting second Mia wondered if this was an elaborate prank. Nobody talked like that. Nobody real talked like that.
"Okay," she said, holding up both hands. "New rule. You do not get to psychoanalyze my nail placement at six a.m. while power-tooling through drywall like you're building a bunker. Some of us have irregular schedules. Some of us work at night."
"Some of us have patients at seven," he said. "Animals don't wait for people to wake up on their own schedule."
"Well, neither do drills, apparently, so I guess we're even."
He tilted his head slightly, studying her the way she imagined he studied a dog that had come in limping and hadn't decided yet whether to bite him. "I'll try to keep the noise contained to the far wall going forward. That's the best I can offer before six-thirty."
"That's not an apology."
"It's a solution. Solutions are generally more useful than apologies." He picked the drill back up, an unmistakable signal that as far as he was concerned, this conversation had reached its natural, efficient conclusion.
Mia opened her mouth to say something devastating and found, infuriatingly, that nothing devastating arrived. She settled for, "You're going to be a delightful neighbor," in a tone that made abundantly clear she meant the opposite.
"Lucas," he said, unexpectedly, just as she reached the door.
She turned back, thrown. "What?"
"My name. Since we're apparently going to be doing this regularly." There was something almost wry in the way he said it, a flicker of dry humor she hadn't expected from a man who spoke about hardware anchoring like scripture. "Lucas Vance."
"I don't need your name to file a noise complaint," Mia said, which was not remotely true, but felt important to say.
"No," he agreed. "But it's generally considered polite to know the name of the person you're threatening with paperwork."
Despite herself, despite the water damage and the six a.m. of it all, Mia felt the corner of her mouth twitch. She smashed the feeling down before it could go anywhere. "Mia," she said, grudgingly, like the word cost her something. "Harper."
"Mia Harper." He said it the way he'd said improperly anchored hardware -- like he was filing it away somewhere precise and permanent, a little index card in an internal system she suspected was alphabetized. "I really will try to keep the noise on the far wall, going forward."
"Sure you will."
"I mean it."
"I'm sure you mean everything you say, Lucas Vance. That's almost the problem." She didn't wait to see what he made of that; she turned on her heel to leave, nearly tripping over one of his perfectly labeled boxes on the way out. GYM EQUIPMENT wobbled but did not fall. Of course it didn't. Even his boxes had better balance than she did at six a.m.
She slammed her own door behind her -- immensely satisfying, structurally probably unwise given the state of the walls in this building -- and stood in the middle of her ruined studio, breathing hard, adrenaline and indignation running hot through her veins.
"Unbelievable," she muttered, surveying the damage. The fox print lay face-up in a puddle of gray water, a corner of the frame warped. She picked it up gingerly and set it on the windowsill to dry, dabbing uselessly at the glass with the hem of her cardigan.
She thought about marching to the building manager's office the second it opened and filing a formal noise complaint, the kind with bullet points, the kind that used the phrase "hostile living environment." She got as far as opening the notes app on her phone and typing Re: Noise Disturbance, Apt 4B before her thumb hovered, uncertain, over the keyboard, and the fight drained out of her as quickly as it had arrived. Filing a complaint required going downstairs before noon, dealing with Gary from the front office who took forty-five minutes to fill out any form, and possibly having to see the drill guy again in a professional capacity, which felt, for reasons she didn't examine too closely, worse than just being annoyed at him privately.
"Whatever," she said out loud, to no one. "Not worth the paperwork."
She deleted the note and, instead, opened her group chat with Priya, her one friend who was reliably awake at ungodly hours because she worked night shifts at the hospital downtown.
MIA: new neighbor moved in. drilled through my wall at 6am. blamed my art for falling off ITS OWN nail. also somehow already has abs and a stopwatch
PRIYA: a stopwatch. for what
MIA: EXACTLY. for WHAT. who owns a stopwatch that isn't a swim coach or a war criminal
PRIYA: is he hot
MIA: that is not the point
PRIYA: it's a little bit the point
MIA: he called my nail placement a structural issue. i almost threw my phone at him
PRIYA: so. hot then
Mia typed out a furious string of exclamation points, deleted them, and set the phone face-down on the desk, because Priya was, infuriatingly, not entirely wrong, and Mia did not have the emotional bandwidth at eight in the morning to examine that further. The man had been objectively, almost aggressively, put-together -- symmetrical in a way that felt almost rude before nine a.m. -- but that had nothing to do with anything. Handsome people could still be insufferable. In her experience, they often were.
Instead she flopped face-down onto her unmade bed, breathing in the familiar smell of turpentine and old coffee that lived permanently in her sheets, and tried to recapture the talking-golden-retriever dream. It didn't come back. What came back, unbidden and unwelcome, was the image of the man on the stepladder -- the absurd, clinical calm of him, the way he'd said improperly anchored hardware like it was a personality trait he was proud of, the way his eyes had done that quick, involuntary once-over of her ridiculous six a.m. outfit before he'd very deliberately schooled his expression back into professional neutrality.
She didn't know his name. She hadn't asked. It felt important, suddenly, that she didn't know his name, like not knowing it kept him safely categorized as An Obstacle rather than A Person.
"Doesn't matter," she told the ceiling. "I'll never speak to Doctor Drill Sergeant again in my life."
She was wrong, of course, though she wouldn't find out how wrong for another forty minutes.
By eight, she'd given up on sleep entirely and dragged herself to her drafting table instead, mug of reheated coffee steaming beside a stack of reference photos for the children's book illustration project that was due in nine days and roughly sixty percent finished. She pulled up the file -- a fox character mid-leap over a stream, the same fox from the ruined print, actually, an earlier study she'd done for the same series -- and lost herself, gradually, in the particular meditative quiet of pencil on paper. This was the version of morning she could tolerate: soft light through the blinds, the hush of a Saturday building slowly waking up around her, no drills, no six a.m. anything.
Every so often, despite herself, she found her gaze drifting toward the shared wall. Nothing. Silence. Maybe he'd finished his bracket-mounting reign of terror. Maybe he'd left for his seven o'clock patient and his six-thirty client and whatever other absurdly disciplined activities filled a man's day when he considered improperly anchored hardware a moral failing.
She was three-quarters of the way through inking the fox's tail when she heard it: a soft, deliberate thump against her window, followed by the unmistakable scrabbling sound of claws on metal.
Mia looked up just in time to see a gray blur launch itself from the neighboring balcony railing, sail through the six inches of open space at the bottom of her cracked window, and land -- with a solidity that suggested significant mass -- directly in the middle of her reference photos, scattering fox studies across the floor like startled birds.
It was, she registered slowly, a cat. A very large, very round, silver-gray cat with a flat, unimpressed face and the kind of dense, plush coat that looked like it had been styled by a professional. It sat in the wreckage of her workspace and looked up at her with pale gold eyes that conveyed, with startling clarity, the sentiment: yes, and?
"Um," Mia said. "Hello?"
The cat did not answer, on account of being a cat, but it did stand, stretch with theatrical slowness, and pad directly across her desk -- knocking a jar of pencils to the floor with a single unbothered swipe of its tail -- before hopping down onto her bed and turning three tight circles atop her pillow, kneading it with obvious proprietary intent.
"That's -- that's my pillow," Mia said, standing up. "That is specifically my area."
The cat settled, tucked its paws beneath its chest like a loaf of bread, and closed its eyes with the serene finality of a creature that had already decided, unilaterally, that this negotiation was over.
Mia stood in the middle of her studio -- fox studies scattered across the floor, coffee cooling on the desk, a strange cat colonizing her pillow with the confidence of a small, furry emperor -- and felt the distinct, dawning sensation that this six a.m. wake-up call had been less an isolated incident and more of an opening move.
She had a feeling, looking at the cat, and beyond it, at the wall that separated her apartment from 4B, that this was only the beginning.
She crouched slowly beside the bed, studying the intruder with the wary curiosity of someone examining an unexploded firework. Up close, the cat was even more absurd than she'd first registered -- a dense, silvery coat that looked plush enough to sink a hand into, a face so flat and round it seemed permanently unimpressed with the entire concept of mornings, and a body with the unmistakable, well-fed silhouette of an animal who had never once in its life missed a meal. There was no collar. No tag. Just an air of profound, unshakeable entitlement, as if the cat had taken one look at the building, done a brief survey of available real estate, and decided Mia's pillow represented the superior investment.
"You're not supposed to be here," she told it, in the low, useless voice people use on animals and toddlers who very clearly do not care. "This is a whole thing. You realize that, right? You've crossed state lines. There are borders."
The cat's ear twitched. One golden eye cracked open, regarded her with what could only be described as profound indifference, and closed again.
"Okay," Mia said. "Cool. Great talk."
She reached out, tentative, and laid two fingers against the impossibly soft fur behind one round ear. The cat did not wake, did not protest, merely exhaled a long, rattling breath through its nose and pressed its head, fractionally, into her hand -- an unconscious, involuntary little lean, like it had decided, somewhere in its small feline brain, that this was an acceptable arrangement after all.
Something in Mia's chest did an unexpected, traitorous little flip. She had wanted, for the entirety of this conversation, to be furious -- at the drilling, at the ruined fox print, at the smug, symmetrical man next door with his stopwatch and his opinions about nail placement -- and instead she found herself sitting on the floor beside her own bed at eight-thirty in the morning, quietly falling in love with a cat that had broken into her apartment and colonized her pillow without so much as an introduction.
"This changes nothing," she informed the cat, who was already snoring, in the specific, wet little snuffle of a very fat, very content animal. "I still hate your owner."
The cat did not dignify this with a response. Outside, faintly, through the thin apartment wall, Mia thought she heard a door open -- and then, unmistakably, a low, controlled, increasingly frantic voice calling a name she didn't yet know, up and down the hallway, again and again, like a man discovering, for the first time in his extremely organized life, that not everything could be scheduled, labeled, or kept inside the lines.
She smiled, despite herself, and did not, for several long, satisfying minutes, get up to tell him where his cat had gone.
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