"Fine, not Marco." She set the cereal down, which is how I knew we'd crossed out of teasing and into worried. "Ruby. Seriously. How long has this been happening?"
I laughed, because laughing is what I do where other people flinch. "It's nothing. A couple of gifts, a note at work last week. Probably a patient with a crush and no sense of boundaries. You'd be amazed what a man decides about you after you put a tube down his throat."
"Patients don't know your tea order, Ruby. Patients don't have a key to your apartment."
"Okay, when you say it in that voice it sounds bad."
"It sounds bad in every voice."
I called the precinct, but only because Deysi planted herself over me until I did, which is the single reason anything sensible ever happens in my life. I got an Officer Bello, a man with the warm, faraway patience of someone counting down to his pension.
"So nothing was taken," he said.
"Nothing's missing. That isn't what scared me."
"Then I'm honestly not sure what there is to write up, ma'am."
"Someone got into a locked apartment to leave me a present and refill my tea. Write that up."
A pause while he decided whether it was worth the ink. "Could a friend have let themselves in to do you a kindness?"
"A friend wouldn't know which brand I buy, or that the chocolate is the one I let myself have on a single day a year."
"I can take a report," he said, with the urgency of a man offering a paper cup to a burning building, "but I'll be honest with you. A clean kitchen and a box of candy isn't much to chase. Being thoughtful isn't a crime."
"Not yet," I said. "That's the flaw in the whole design, though, isn't it? You people get interested the day after."
He took the report. I could hear his pen refusing to move.
My phone buzzed while I was on hold for a case number I'm fairly sure got walked directly into the river. A text. Caleb. The name alone dropped the temperature in the room.
We need to talk, it said. Then, before I could decide not to answer: I mean it. Don't ignore me. I just want five minutes.
"Is that who I think it is?" Deysi was reading my face again. "It's him. What does the walking red flag want now?"
"To talk. Five minutes."
"For Caleb, talking is a contact sport." She put out her hand. "Give me the phone. I'll tell him you've taken vows."
"He's been texting for two weeks." I didn't hand it over. "You don't think it could be"
"That your control-freak ex, the one who once tracked your phone to 'keep you safe,' might be leaving gifts and tidying your kitchen?" She lifted both shoulders. "Honestly? It's exactly his brand. I think you should give Officer Pension his full name."
I didn't, though. Not to protect Caleb. Because some animal part of me already knew it wasn't that tidy, and I didn't yet have the words for why. The truth is my mind kept wandering off where it had no business going, back to the man I'd put back together barely a week earlier, the one who'd opened his eyes on a gurney and made me a promise in a voice like a heavy doorswinging shut. He'd told me he wouldn't forget me. I'd filed it under the morphine and moved on. But the gifts had started that same week, and I'm a nurse. I believe in patterns, and this one was sending a cold warning up my spine, right there in my own kitchen, under my own lights.
Deysi had a shift. She didn't want to leave, and she stood at the door reinventing reasons to stay.
"Come with me. Sit in the break room. You can grade my charting."
"I am not riding the train back to that hospital to watch you not chart."
"Then lock everything. Both locks. Text me the second you're in bed." She aimed a finger at me like a woman reading out a verdict. "Both locks, Ruby."
"Both locks. I promise."
And I meant it. That's the part I keep circling back to. I meant it.
After she left, I lasted nineteen minutes alone in there. I know the number because I watched every one of them tick over on the microwave. The quiet had a grain to it now. Every ordinary noise the building makes, the pipes, the upstairs neighbor's bad knee, the radiator clearing its throat, landed like a footstep in the hall. I kept staring at the mug I'd turned back the right way, half waiting for it to move on its own. So I did the only brave thing a coward has on the menu, which is leave. I pulled on my coat, took the cash I'd been hoarding for nothing good, and went to buy a lock that no thoughtful patient could ever pick.
