Rachel Ellis believed in thresholds.

  She liked thresholds because of their practicality: a line where something became Real. A moving box became clutter the second you left it on the floor overnight. A couch became a home the first time you ate on it and didn’t apologize to yourself. A meal became a routine if you sat down.

  So she ate her noodles standing at the kitchen counter.

  The takeout container steamed faintly, fogging her glasses every time she leaned in. She pushed them up with the back of her wrist, annoyed, and twirled noodles with the careful efficiency of someone performing a task correctly.

  It was good. Comfortingly salty, warm enough to make her shoulders loosen considerably.

  She resented that.

  Across the living room, her television sat on the wall like it had always been there.

  Rachel stared at it between bites.

  It looked right. Clean. Intentional. The bracket was hidden. The cables were managed. Nothing drooped or dangled like a confession. It was the kind of thing you saw in other people’s apartments and assumed their lives had shape.

  She couldn’t stop looking at it.

  She didn't even like television. The screen would likely stay black for weeks at a time. Yet every glance forced her to accept the uncomfortable truth that getting it on the wall had taken two people.

  The building had tried to embarrass her before. Move-in day, specifically, had taught her that King’s Park Flats didn’t do straightforward.

  She’d booked the time slot. She’d scanned her fob. She’d worn her Very Adult Face while the movers wrestled the first load into the elevator—big, awkward boxes that made the space feel suddenly too small.

  For a few blessed minutes, the doors stayed open the way "move mode" promised.

  Then, halfway through unloading, they began to drift closed again—slow and determined, like the elevator had remembered it had another purpose. One mover wedged his boot in the gap with the weary reflex of someone who’d fought this exact machine before. The other kept a hand on a boxed piece of furniture, bracing it as if the elevator might try to steal it back.

  Rachel jabbed the “door open” button with escalating conviction. The doors hesitated. Then kept closing.

  She had her fob in her hand—I live here, I signed a lease, I paid a deposit—and still couldn’t make the building behave.

  And then Noah Bennett had appeared, quiet and unhurried. He took in the boot, the inching doors, the panel, and said, “Move mode probably timed out.” Like it was a normal sentence to know.

  He pointed at a small icon on the display. “Tap your fob here again. Then hit that.”

  Rachel did. The elevator beeped; the doors eased back open and stayed that way, finally cooperative.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Thank you,” she’d said, still controlled, but warmer around the edges. “I didn’t realize it had a timer.”

  “It's not something that comes up often,” Noah had replied. “The building just likes its inside jokes.”

  Now, staring at the mounted TV, Rachel could admit—if only to herself—that he hadn’t just fixed a mechanism. He’d fixed the moment around it. The part where she’d been five seconds from becoming a situation.

  Noah Bennett had made it look easy.

  That was the part her brain kept circling: he’d shown up calmly, as if it was nothing to step into a near-stranger’s apartment and solve a problem, and—more importantly—he’d done it without making her feel stupid.

  He never said You should have known, echoing her own brain, nor did he make a joke at her expense. He skipped the subtle, evaluative look people usually gave her half-unpacked life. Instead, he looked at the problem, looked at her, and simply made the problem smaller.

  He’d looked at the problem. Then he’d looked at her. Then he’d made the problem smaller.

  Rachel took another bite and chewed too fast, as if speed could turn this into fuel instead of comfort.

  Her phone lay face-down beside the container, because she had learned that if she looked at it while tense she would end up texting her mother some version of I’m fine that read like I am not fine.

  Her gaze drifted back to the TV.

  Noah’s voice, in her head—steady and matter-of-fact: It looks good. Seriously.

  Rachel exhaled through her nose. The noodles were hot, which explained why her cheeks were, too. Probably.

  She remembered the moment the screen had clicked into place—his hands on his hips, his expression pleased in a contained way, like he didn’t want to make a big deal out of winning against gravity. He’d stepped back and looked at the wall like it was simply… done. Then he’d looked at her, waiting, as if she got to decide what it meant.

  And she had accepted it. The help. The normalness of it. The way he’d left right after, cleanly, without hovering and without turning it into a conversation she had to manage.

  Rachel set her chopsticks down and leaned her hip against the counter, staring at the mounted TV like it might offer her a diagnosis.

  She had nearly invited him to eat with her, though he had spared her from such an attempt. Eating together could have made it a thing.

  She had no interest in "that," whatever that was. She just wanted a neighbor. Specifically, a helpful, calm, dryly funny neighbor who could appear in the hallway, make something complicated feel solvable, and then disappear again before she had to decide how to be grateful without turning it into debt.

  She wanted that, and she wanted not to want it.

  Rachel picked up her chopsticks again, then paused—because the thought had come with another, smaller one, irritatingly physical and completely uninvited: the way his forearm had braced the TV while he adjusted the mount, like it was nothing. Just steady, capable, close enough that she’d noticed.

  Her brain cleared its throat, sternly.

  Rachel took another bite like she could drown the thought in soy sauce.

  Her mother would be delighted to hear she’d met a nice boy across the hall who owned a drill. She would also ask questions, because questions were how she loved, and then become carefully, quietly concerned that a man had been in Rachel’s apartment at all.

  Rachel wasn't going to tell her. Not because it was a secret—it wasn't—but because there was simply nothing to tell.

  Except—

  Her mind snagged, unhelpfully, on his name again.

  Noah.

  It sounded plain. Ordinary. The kind of name you didn’t overthink.

  And yet it sat in her head anyway.

  Rachel stared once more at the mounted TV, then at the coffee table box still waiting in the corner like a patient threat.

  She could do that tomorrow, she thought, with a brittle optimism that had lied to her before.

  Or she could, theoretically, ask for help.

  The thought tightened her throat. Asking meant admitting, and needing, and letting someone else see the seams she was trying so hard to hide.

  She was fine.

  She had eaten. She had a mounted TV. She had made it through the day without calling her mother. These were, objectively, successes. And yet the apartment still felt too quiet—like it was waiting to see what she did next.

  Rachel turned and looked at the television again.

  It looked like it belonged.

  For a dangerous moment, Rachel wondered what it would feel like if she did, too.