The Older Woman Next Door - Hunter Graves

"You're blocking the stairs."

Adrian turned around, one bag still hanging off his shoulder, and saw her standing two steps below him. Arms crossed. Not moving. Not in any hurry to move him along either, just standing there like she had all the patience in the world and none of it left over for him specifically.

"Sorry — almost done." He shoved his last box against the wall to clear space, and it toppled sideways, spilling a tangle of phone chargers and a single, ancient-looking games console controller across the step between them.

She looked down at the mess, then back up at him, one eyebrow raised, saying nothing at all, which somehow felt worse than if she'd said something.

"I can explain that," he said, crouching to gather it all back into the box.

"I don't need an explanation. I need to get down these stairs before my milk goes off."

"Right. Sorry." He scooped the rest of it up, knocking his knee against the box in the process, swearing under his breath.

She didn't smile. She just waited, arms still crossed, watching him scramble, like she'd been waiting her whole life for men to get out of her way, and this was just today's particular version of that.

He got a proper look at her while he cleared the last of his things off the steps. Mid-forties, maybe. Dark hair pinned up loosely, a few strands loose around her face like she'd stopped fixing it hours ago and given up trying again. Reading glasses pushed up onto her head, forgotten there entirely. A cardigan thrown over what looked like pajamas even though it was three in the afternoon on a weekday, and an expression that had clearly been aimed at plenty of people before him, worn smooth from years of practice.

"You're new," she said. Not a question.

"Adrian." He held out a hand. She looked at it like it was an odd thing to offer on a staircase, then shook it anyway, quick, businesslike, her fingers colder than he expected, gone again before he'd fully registered the contact.

"I know. Mrs. Bennett's told me twice already. Once when your deposit cleared, and once again this morning, in case I'd somehow forgotten in the last twelve hours." She stepped past him, sideways, careful not to touch his boxes or him. "Try not to slam that door at night. These walls remember everything, and I sleep lightly."

She kept climbing. He watched her go — four more steps to the landing, then straight to the door across from the one that was apparently now his.

"Wait," he said, mostly to say something, mostly because he didn't want the conversation to end yet, though he couldn't have explained why to save his life. "Which one's mine?"

"Whichever one doesn't have my name on it." She didn't turn around. "You'll figure it out. You seem clever enough, underneath the chargers."

Her door closed. Not hard. Just done, the way a sentence ends when there's nothing left to add to it.

Adrian stood there on the landing holding a lamp he didn't remember picking up at any point, staring at her closed door, feeling like he'd just lost an argument he hadn't known he was having in the first place.

The building was old — the kind with a staircase that creaked in the same two spots no matter who was walking on it, and a smell of furniture polish and old wood that clung to everything, including, within a week, Adrian's clothes, his sheets, even the box of cereal he'd left on the kitchen counter too long. The wallpaper in the hall was a faded floral pattern that had probably been fashionable forty years ago, curling slightly at the seams where the damp had gotten in over the decades, and the light fixture on the landing buzzed faintly whenever the wiring got wet from the weather outside.

Ground floor belonged to the Bennetts. Mr. Bennett hadn't said more than nine words to Adrian in total across their first week of acquaintance, most of them about the bins, delivered with the same flat urgency each time no matter how many times Adrian confirmed, patiently, that he understood which day was which. Mrs. Bennett, on the other hand, had opinions about everything under the sun, and she delivered them over tea nobody had asked for, in a kitchen that smelled permanently of toast and lavender and something faintly medicinal underneath it all.

"First floor's got two rooms," she told him his first morning, setting a cup down on his windowsill without waiting to be invited in, settling herself into the room like she owned a small piece of it too. "Same landing, same four steps up from the hall. You're across from Elena."

"I met her. On the stairs. She wasn't exactly thrilled to see me."

"Did she tell you to get out of her way?"

"Something like that. More politely than that makes it sound, but yes."

Mrs. Bennett laughed, the short, knowing kind, and settled herself onto the edge of Adrian's one unpacked chair like she planned on staying a considerable while. "That's Elena being friendly, believe it or not. You should see how she is when she's genuinely not in the mood for company."

"Is she often not in the mood?"

"Depends entirely on the week. Depends on the day, sometimes, if I'm honest." Mrs. Bennett picked at a loose thread on her cardigan sleeve, considering her next words carefully. "She's had a hard few years, that one. Doesn't talk about it, not to me, not to anyone as far as I can tell, and I've learned not to ask twice. But you can see it in her sometimes, if you know where to look for it. A kind of quiet that isn't really quiet at all, underneath. Like a kettle that's been left just short of boiling for years."

"That's a strange way to describe a person."

"You'll understand eventually, dear." Mrs. Bennett stood, satisfied with whatever conclusion she'd privately arrived at. "Most people who move in across from her do, sooner or later. Give it a month."

He found her full name properly that evening — not from the landlady, but from the row of small mailboxes screwed into the wall of the entrance hall, tarnished brass slightly green at the edges from age. Two plates, stacked. A. Vale. Under it, E. Hart.

Elena.

He said it once, quiet, testing how it sat in his mouth, standing alone in the dim hallway with a stack of unopened mail addressed to a stranger who'd apparently lived there before him. It sat strangely well, better than it had any right to for a woman who'd told him to get out of her way within the first sixty seconds of meeting him.

He learned her age the way he learned nearly everything else in that building over the following days — over tea, uninvited, delivered along with commentary he hadn't asked for and couldn't quite figure out how to politely decline.

"She's been with us six years now," Mrs. Bennett said the next morning, refilling his cup without asking whether he actually wanted more. "Forty-five now, I believe, though she'd never confirm the exact number if you asked outright. Divorced. Doesn't talk about it, and I've learned not to ask twice." A pause, and then, more pointed, testing something in him deliberately. "Keeps to herself, mostly. Though I noticed she said more than two full sentences to you yesterday, which is more than she's said to anyone new who's moved in here in about a year."

"Maybe she just likes complaining about chargers on the stairs."

"Maybe." Mrs. Bennett's eyes glinted in a way that suggested she didn't believe that explanation for a second, but she let it go, moving on to a story about the previous tenant's unfortunate habit of burning toast at odd hours.

Adrian did the math anyway, later that night, lying on top of his still-unmade bed surrounded by half-emptied boxes and the general chaos of a life not yet properly unpacked. Twenty-one years between his door and hers. He said the number over in his head a few times, turning it like a coin between his fingers, trying to decide what it actually weighed, if anything.

He told himself it didn't mean anything. It was just distance, measured wrong, a number that belonged to paperwork and birth certificates and nothing else worth losing sleep over.

That night, lying in a bed still stiff with new sheets that smelled faintly of the plastic they'd come wrapped in, he heard her door open across the landing. Footsteps, soft, crossing to the bathroom. A pause, water running briefly. Then footsteps back, and the quiet click of her door again.

He lay there a long time after the sound stopped, listening to nothing, annoyed at himself for listening at all, for caring whether the light under her door went dark before or after his own.

It went dark first. He noticed that too, and told himself it didn't mean anything either.