Chapter 1
Ebba hated the sound of Karl’s keyboard.
It was 01:34 a.m. and the click-clack echoed through the paper-thin walls of their apartment building in Stockholm like a reminder that she was trapped in her own personal hell: a shoebox studio across the corridor from the most antisocial man she’d ever encountered.
“Of course he’s awake,” she muttered, scrolling through her own late-night doom-scroll on Instagram. Her latest story had just 48 views. Weak.
Karl, meanwhile, sat at his desk surrounded by three monitors and a plant that was somehow both dying and growing aggressively. He wore noise-cancelling headphones and had no idea he was ruining Ebba’s night. Again. In his world, she didn’t exist. Or rather, she existed too much. Too loud, too pretty, too fake.
He had seen her filming herself doing some weird little TikTok dance in the hallway last week and nearly dropped his recycling bag.
“Influencers are parasites,” he’d mumbled under his breath.
Ebba had caught the look. She always did. Karl didn’t know that she saw him when he looked at her like she was some walking, talking symptom of modern decay. She’d pegged him ages ago. Incel. Definitely. Probably wrote angry Reddit posts about how women only date tall guys with jawlines carved by Nordic gods.
They hadn’t spoken a full sentence to each other in almost eight months of living across from one another.
Until Tuesday.
Until the power went out.
Until the elevator broke and the building fell into a strange, flickering darkness, lit only by battery-powered fairy lights and resentment.
And Ebba, desperate for phone charge and internet, knocked on Karl’s door.
