Chapter 31: Behind closed doors

Chapter 31: Chapter 31: Behind closed doors

Garrett was somewhere between admiring the last of the light outside and mentally running through how the evening was going to go when it hit him.

Fuck. Food.

He had a fridge with, generously, half a jar of something and a carton of milk that was pushing its luck. No wine. Nothing that could be described as a meal without somebody’s expectations getting badly disappointed in the process.

"Sorry, quick change of plan." He leaned forward toward the driver. "Could you stop at the shop up there on the left?"

The driver indicated without comment.

"Everything alright?" Emiliana asked.

"Yeah. Just remembered my fridge currently contains a jar of something I can’t identify and some milk that’s spoilt. Give me two minutes."

She raised an eyebrow, amused rather than concerned. "Very romantic."

"I’ll make it work. Wait here."

He moved through the shop faster than he usually would, doing the maths as he went. A decent bottle of red wine, nothing that would embarrass him but nothing that pretended to be something it wasn’t.

Chicken. Cream, garlic, parmesan, the basics for something that wasn’t going to be complicated but would at least taste like effort. A loaf of the good bread for garlic bread, if he could remember the ratio of butter to garlic without looking it up. A couple of small things beside the till, in case neither of them was actually that hungry.

Not excessive. He wasn’t trying to compete with whatever the Vane kitchen produced on a Tuesday. He just didn’t want tonight to end with him apologising for tap water.

He paid, grabbed the bags, and headed back out.

"So," Emiliana said, once he was back in the car, bags settled between his feet, "what did emergency shopping produce?"

"Chicken Alfredo. Garlic bread and a red wine, I hope you like?"

"I dont mind, anything is fine." She looked away "Garlic bread happens to be my favourite by the way" She let out a little mischievous smile.

"Don’t do that" he smiled back faintly.

She looked mildly impressed despite herself. "You cook?"

"Reasonably. Nothing that’ll end up on a menu anywhere."

"We’ll see."

---

The building, when they reached it, didn’t have gates or hedges or anyone standing at a distance doing an impression of furniture. Just a normal block, slightly tired brick, a door that needed a proper shove to open properly. Garrett had lived here long enough that none of it registered as anything other than home.

He got out first, checked they had everything, and held the door.

"This is me," he said, mostly redundant given they were already walking through it.

"I gathered."

They went in together, Garrett with the shopping, Emiliana with the flowers still carefully upright in one hand, and started up toward his floor. He was mostly thinking about timing, how long the sauce would actually take, whether he’d left the oven clock right, whether the flat still smelled faintly of the new curtains or whether that had worn off by now, and not paying much attention to anything beyond the stairs in front of him.

Freya was by her window when the movement outside caught her eye, a car pulling away, two people crossing toward the entrance.

She recognized Garrett first, out of habit more than anything, the specific way you recognize someone you’ve lived near for years without needing to properly look.

Then she noticed who was with him.

She went still for a second, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

Emiliana Vane!

Walking into their building. With Garrett?!

She didn’t open her door. Didn’t call out, didn’t find an excuse to be in the stairwell at exactly the right moment. She just watched from the window as the two of them disappeared from view toward his floor, flowers in one hand, shopping bags in the other, neither of them looking anywhere near her window.

She stood there a moment longer after they’d gone, turning the sight over in her mind.

Garrett hadn’t so much as glanced up the whole way in.

Soon after, they got to his Door.

Garrett’s key stopped an inch from the lock.

He suddenly had no idea if the sofa was in the right position.

He’d moved it twice yesterday and settled on a spot that felt fine at the time, but standing here now, with Emiliana a few inches to his left holding the flowers he’d bought for her, "fine at the time" didn’t feel like a high enough standard anymore.

Had he made the bed properly, or just pulled the new duvet over it and called it done? Was the picture frame still crooked? He’d meant to fix that. He was fairly sure he’d meant to fix that.

Did the flat smell like anything. Normal was fine. Normal was all he was asking for. He just couldn’t remember if he’d checked.

And the curtains, actually good, or just better than what he’d had before, which was an extremely low bar that Emiliana had no reason to know about and even less reason to care about.

He ran through it all in about two seconds, the specific kind of panic that only shows up once it’s far too late to do anything about it.

"You good?" Emiliana asked, watching him hover at his own front door like it might bite him.

"Yep." He turned the key. "Just admiring my door. Such a World class door."

"That’s nice."

He pushed it open and looked in first, quick, instinctive, some last desperate scan for anything embarrassing he might have missed. Nothing leapt out. He stepped back and let her go ahead of him.

Emiliana walked in and took her time doing what she always did without meaning to, She read the room.

It wasn’t a large space. One main room doing several jobs at once, a kitchen tucked into the corner of it, a door leading off to what she assumed was the bedroom. None of it matched what she’d grown up around. No high ceilings, no staff quietly making sure everything stayed exactly where it belonged, no furniture that cost more than most people’s cars.

She noticed that immediately. It didn’t bother her the way it might have bothered some people she knew.

What caught her attention instead was everything that clearly hadn’t been here long.

The curtains, still holding that just-hung crease along the top. A rug that looked new enough to still have the faint impression of its folded packaging. A low coffee table with nothing on it yet but clearly placed on purpose, centered, deliberate. A couple of small lamps giving the room a warmer light than the bare overhead bulb she’d have expected. Plants on the windowsill, a picture frame on the wall that was very slightly crooked in a way that made her want to reach over and fix it herself.

None of it was expensive. She could tell that at a glance. It was the kind of furniture you bought because it did the job, not because it made a statement. But it had been chosen. Placed. Someone had stood in this room recently and decided where things should go.

That was the part that stayed with her.

She’d been in enormous houses that felt like nobody actually lived in them. Perfect, cold, arranged by people who were paid to arrange them and never asked what anyone actually wanted. This was smaller than her walk-in closet, probably, and it felt more like somewhere a person existed than half the rooms in her own house did.

She glanced toward the bedroom door, left slightly ajar, enough to see a made bed with the new duvet pulled almost, almost smooth.

Recent. All of it recent, she was fairly sure. She just didn’t say so out loud.

When she turned back, Garrett was watching her.

Not obviously. He was doing a reasonably good job of looking like a man setting shopping bags on a counter and not at all like someone waiting for a verdict. But she caught it anyway. The slight tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes kept flicking up between bags like he was checking her reaction without wanting to be caught checking.

"It’s nice," she said.

He looked up. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." She set the flowers down on the coffee table, right in the center, like she already understood that was where things went here. "It feels like somewhere you actually live."

Something in his shoulders let go that she hadn’t fully realized was tight until it wasn’t anymore.

"Good," he said. "I was hoping it wouldn’t look like I’d lost a fight with a furniture catalogue."

She smiled faintly.

Then she looked back around the room, taking in the small details again.

For the first time since stepping inside, Garrett stopped worrying about whether she’d approve of the place.