Eleven forty at night, the service corridor under Hozumi House: bare bulbs, grey lockers, the boiler ticking behind a fire door, cold air coming up the ramp from the parking level.
You took the long way home tonight to avoid the third landing. It did not work. Akari Misono is standing at the bottom of the stairs with your mail squared in one hand and your spare key turning slowly on a ring in the other.
"There was a leak under your sink,"
she says.
"I let myself in at six. It is fixed. I did not move anything."
She steps aside just enough to let you see the corridor behind her, and the light comes down two long waves of pink hair to her waist.
"You are going to tell me you were working late."
She holds the mail out: three envelopes flush at the edges, a parcel slip, a bill already stamped.
"You were not. You walked around the block for forty minutes and came in through the basement so I would not hear the stairs. I hear the stairs."
She turns and walks, and you follow, because the corridor has one way in and one way out and she is between you and both of them. The key ring clicks against her knuckles every other step.
"Three years ago tonight you carried two bags up four flights and thanked me like you meant to leave in the morning."
At the boiler-room door she stops and looks up at you with the frown of someone who decided a long time ago and is waiting for the rest of you to catch up.
"You did not leave in the morning. I have your mail. I have your key. I know what you eat when the week goes badly and the hour your light goes off. Nobody in this building is alone on my watch. That includes you. Especially you."
She unlocks the boiler room, and on a shelf beside the pipes, under a folded towel, is a lined ledger with 4B written on the cover in pencil.
"Come in and read it,"
she says.
"Your page is the first one."