Chapter Text
The stairwell smelled like dust and old coffee grounds. Violet hooked her elbow around a cardboard box and juggled the car seat on her hip, the straps creaking as June shifted. Six months old and already full of opinions; right now, the opinion was that carseats were not as comforting as her mother’s arms.
“We’re nearly there,” Violet murmured, breathless, nudging open the third-floor door with her knee. “Promise.”
The hallway was narrow and sun-faded, a runner rug anchoring buckets of spider plants that someone was trying very hard to keep alive. Apartment 3B’s door was a chipped rectangle the color of an old manila folder. She set the car seat down, fished for the key with her free hand, and missed the lock twice. On the third try it slid in. Relief arrived like cold water on a hot summer’s day. Much like the cold water Violet would be downing the second she set everything down.
Inside lay a small living room with scuffed, faded hardwood floors- the type that creak with each step, illuminated by a rectangle of afternoon light that streamed in from the windows. There was a kitchen big enough for exactly one human and a drying rack. A small table and chairs set just at the division between the two rooms- a welcomed gift from the previous owners. There was a tiny bedroom with faded rose colored carpet, a closet that would be a miracle if it held more than two winter coats, and a bathroom with tile the color of a robin’s egg. An apartment that had fallen into her lap. Not much, by any measure. It was worn and lived in and Violet could tell the wallpaper was lifting and yellowing… and-
But the lock worked. The door clicked solidly behind her. June made a questioning squeak from the carrier, then kicked her feet as if to say, “Okay, now show me.”
Violet exhaled into the quiet and set the car seat on the floor. “We did it,” she told the baby, and the baby blew a spit bubble in agreement.
She moved quickly: a box to the counter, a bag to the couch, another to the bedroom. In the kitchen she set the formula tin beside a thrifted kettle. In the living room she unrolled a faded throw rug she didn’t remember buying. June fussed from her bouncer, then laughed at the ceiling fan, then fussed again.
From somewhere above, a guitar drifted down. Not amplified, not aggressive. A close sound; fingers finding a pattern and riding it. Violet paused with a stack of plastic plates in her hands. The song wasn’t anything she knew, just a gentle loop, two chords and a stretch of something warmer than the building’s stale air. It was welcomed and drowned out the obnoxious yelling from her nextdoor neigbors. The Steins.
She had met the older couple once. Maybe it was in passing on the day she had signed the lease and fished out the crumpled check that signed away half of her savings from her bag. First month’s rent and a security deposit. Beth, Mrs. Stein, had cooed over June and fussed over the lack of hat on the baby’s head. It warm. Violet thought Mrs. Stein and her mother would get along well.
She listened long enough for the tight place behind her ribs to loosen by half. Then, because there were still eight boxes and a baby to feed and a text from the ER nurse manager, Alice, asking if she could pick up a night shift this week (“if you’re up for it, no pressure but we’re short TONIGHT”), she moved again.
By sunset, the bassinet was assembled beside the air mattress, the sheets smelled faintly like lavender laundry soap, and June had made it clear that this new room was foreign and therefore suspicious. Violet paced in a long figure-eight from window to kitchen, humming a song she couldn’t name. When June finally dozed, the kettle clicked off, Mr and Mrs Stein called a truce, and silence flooded back in—the electric kind that hummed in her ears and made every muscle recount its day.
She looked at the lock again. Locked, latched, chained. She touched each once, an old ritual. The baby sighed. Violet let herself on a creaky folding chair.
Thin, familiar guitar slid through the ceiling cracks again. She closed her eyes and let the music braid through her brain.
~*~
“Are you keeping the ‘Free with Purchase’ box, or did you finally realize that its a cry for help?” Ross asked, pen in his mouth, eyes locked on a page with font that was way too small. Criminal Procedure. His least favorite.
Matty lay on the rug with his guitar balanced across his stomach. His hair was a crazed mess of curls sprawled out like a halo. The window was open to let out the afternoon’s heat, and the record player spun a secondhand James Taylor record he’d rescued from the shop’s discount bin. On the coffee table: two cups with forgotten espresso rings, an unused coaster that said BE NICE OR GO HOME, a handful of demo CDs a kid had earnest-eyed into his hands that morning. He’d promised to listen. He always promised to listen.
“It’s aspirational marketing,” Matty said, plucking a gentle pattern from muscle memory. “One might land in the hands of some record label exec.”
“Or a landfill,” Ross said without looking up, too scared to lose his place among the neverending page. “What’s that, the lullaby loop again?”
“Mm?” Matty shifted. The chords had arrived without asking—something he found himself falling into late at night when words got complicated and thoughts were neverending. “S’calming.”
“Uh-huh.” Ross underlined something, flipped his book shut, and leaned back in his chair. “Neighbor downstairs moved in today. Baby, too.”
“I clocked the car seat.” Matty turned his head. “Thought I heard crying earlier.”
“Not her at first,” Ross said. “That was mostly Ben from 5E. Baby started a little later.”
Matty tried to pretend he hadn’t been listening in the quiet stretches: footsteps soft, door opening and shutting, the scrape of furniture on wood. He’d learned the building’s sounds over years—Mrs. DeLuca’s three-thump knock, Ben’s habit of humming aloud in the hallway at two a.m., the wooden stairs and upper floor tenants groaning on payday when everyone bought extra groceries. New sounds meant new stories. He was nosy like that, mostly because he liked people. Liked, in a way he’d sometimes felt stupid for, being useful.
“Don’t be weird about it,” Ross warned, as if reading his mind. “Let’s give it a week before you start the Welcome Basket routine.”
“It’s not a routine,” Matty scoffed. The guitar’s loop ran like a brook. “It’s kindness.”
“It’s you adopting strays.”
“Humans aren’t strays,” Matty said automatically, then snorted. “Okay, humans are absolutely strays. But I’m not adopting. I’m just offering coffee.”
He pictured the girl he’d glimpsed earlier: her dark hair knotted up, T-shirt gone loose at the neck, shoulders set like a person who’d learned the hard way not to spill things. The baby had been asleep. A cutie with the kind of face that made your chest soften.
“Don’t be weird,” Ross said again, gentler now.
“I’m never weird.”
“You’re always weird.”
Matty grinned at the ceiling, then set the guitar aside and padded barefoot into the kitchen. He rifled the cupboard until he found a fresh bag of the house blend. He could have written “free sample” on it and called it a marketing cost. Instead he grabbed a paper bag, slid the beans inside, and tore a square from his notebook. For early mornings or long nights, he wrote, then paused and signed it simply, —M.
Ross watched him with the fond exasperation of a man who knew exactly what he was like. “Hope she likes coffee,” he said.
Matty’s middle finger flew up while he was halfway out the door.
~*~
June woke unhappy. Violet could feel it in the way the baby’s body went taut in her arms, like a small vibrato. Milk helped for six minutes, according to the clock on the stove. Rocking helped for three. The world, however, was new and loud and definitely not the old apartment at her in-law’s, which meant protesting was both necessary and morally correct to the six month old.
At the soft knock on the door—three quick taps, no pause—June startled, hiccuped, and quieted for the span of one breath.
Violet peered through the peephole. The man on the other side looked like he’d walked out of a band photo and then taken a shower: hair curly and chaotic, clean tee, tattoos tucked into his sleeves and trying to escape. He white knuckled a brown paper bag like it might bolt.
She opened the door the distance of the chain.
“Hi. Coffee?” he said. His voice was lower than she’d expected—more gentle than gravel.
At her not-so-subtle reluctance, he paused before taking a breath and on the exhale tried, “Sorry. I’m Matty. Upstairs. This is—well. Coffee. Consider it a Welcome-to-the-building gift.”
Violet blinked. The smell hit her: rich and warm, the kind of roast that curled around your brainstem and clouded your olfactory bulb. June squawked softly on her shoulder.
“That’s… nice,” Violet exhaled, suspicious of nice but determined to be polite anyway. “I—thank you.”
“No worries,” he said, upping the politeness by sliding his eyes toward the ceiling instead of trying to peer around her door. “If you hate coffee, I also have tea. Or I can leave you alone. Leaving people alone is an option I’m fully capable of.”
The corner of Violet’s mouth twitched before she could stop it. He grinned like a person who enjoyed claiming small victories.
She unlatched the chain and took the small brown bag. The paper was warm where it had been cradled against his palms. He didn’t ask her name. He didn’t let his gaze linger. He simply nodded, both hands up in a goofy, harmless gesture, and backed away.
“Welcome, anyway,” his smile never faded. “Shout if you need… I don’t know. A screwdriver. Sugar. Directions to the closest laundromat. We’re an opinionated building.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Violet said.
He gave a short nod, then padded up the stairs, humming the progression she’d been hearing through the ceiling all day.
She shut the door and leaned her back against it, the cool wood anchoring her spine. The bag crinkled in her hand. And in a tentative lapse in judgement she peered in. Inside, beans and a note, handwriting blocky and careful: For early mornings or long nights. Underlined once, as if he meant it.
June relaxed a fraction against her shoulder. “We can’t drink this,” Violet told her, bouncing the baby gently. “No matter how persuasive the upstairs neighbor is.”
June answered with a gargle. Violet set the bag on the counter like a small altar, then went back to pacing.
~*~
Night threaded itself through the blinds and ran like ink across the ceiling. The city hummed quietly outside: a siren far away, someone laughing on the sidewalk, a dog negotiating terms with a fire hydrant. In their square of the world, time slowed and stuck.
June cried.
Not the end-of-the-world cry, thank God. The other one: the I-can’t-get-comfortable-in-this-new-house cry; the there’s-too-much-air, too-much-light, too-many unknown smells cry. Violet’s body remembered every version. The way you learn the difference between a I’m-hungry squeal and a my-sock-is-plotting my -murder-wail.
She tried all of it in turn. Milk. Rocking. Pacing. A pacifier. The white-noise app set to “waterfall in a pine forest.” Humming the song her mother had sung absentmindedly while doing dishes. June’s breath hitched and steadied, hitched and steadied, an ocean trying for shore.
“You’re okay,” Violet whispered into the baby’s hair. She could feel her own edges prickling the way they did when she hadn’t slept enough—light too bright, thoughts too loud. “You’re safe. I promise. I checked the lock three times.”
June’s cries echoed off the freshly painted walls. Then, without warning, another sound entered the room, as soft as a held breath: guitar. The same loop from the days prior, only slower now, steady as a heartbeat. Two chords. A shift. A melody so soothing it felt nostalgic.
Violet paused mid-sway. The guitar traced the room like the carress of a loved one. June blinked into the dark and went still. Violet took this opening to slip the purple pacifier back into her mouth. She adjusted her hold and swayed to match the rhythm. June’s mouth worked around the pacifier like a thoughtful fish, keeping time with the soft melody seeping in through the ceiling cracks.
“That’s it,” she whispered, as much to herself as to June. “There you go.”
The loop continued, unhurried. Violet pictured the neighbor—Matty—sitting cross-legged on an old rug, eyes unfocused, hands moving without looking. It occurred to her that he might not even know he was playing a lullaby. He might just be playing.
An odd ache arrived, a clean one, like a note struck in a newly tuned room. She held her daughter and let the guitar’s tide lift and lower them both until June went heavy in her arms, sleep curling up beneath her chin.
Violet didn’t cry—it wasn’t that kind of night—but she felt the prickle that comes before it. Not grief. Gratitude. For the music. For the lock. For the paper bag of coffee waiting for morning.
“Thank you,” she said softly, looking up at the ceiling like it might carry the words.
~*~
Matty didn’t think of it as playing for the baby. He thought of it as not thinking at all.
His fingers moved on their own, old grooves worn into them by years and then worn deeper by the last few months of closing down the shop and coming home jittery with caffeine and ideas. The city had been loud today—customers chatty, a kid bright-eyed about a new band Matty had somehow never heard of, a delivery guy with a story about a raccoon that had held him hostage outside the back door. Now, in the apartment, he could let all that noise thin and settle.
Ross had a highlighter behind his ear and his laptop open to a TA’s study guide. “You’ve played that same progression for twenty minutes,” he said without looking up.
“Minutes are a social construct,” Matty murmured. “Time is fake. Babies are real.”
Ross’s mouth twitched. “She quieted, though.”
Matty didn’t point out that he’d been listening for that, tuning for it the way you tune a radio station. The first time the baby had wailed, he’d stopped, not wanting to intrude. Then he’d felt—what? A tug? He’d fallen back into the loop carefully, like easing into a bath you weren’t sure was the right temperature. After two minutes, the cry had softened. After three, silence.
He wasn’t noble. He just liked when things were better rather than worse.
“You’re gonna adopt them,” Ross said conversationally. “Coffee first. Then playlists. Then free muffins. Then you’re installing a baby gate on our stairs.” He listed off his accusations while touching his right pointer finger to each coinciding finger on his left hand.
“I don’t do muffins,” Matty said. “I do biscuits.”
“Semantics.”
“Cuisine,” Matty corrected primly.
Ross flipped a page and let his pen fall. He watched Matty for a moment, eyes warm in a way that said he could be teased only so far. “You’re a good neighbor.”
Matty shrugged, because anything truer might tip something over. “She looked tired,” he said instead. “Like hospital tired.”
“You noticed.”
“You’d notice too if you came out in daylight.”
“Rude.” Ross pointed his pen at the guitar. “Keep going. It was working.”
Matty obeyed, letting the loop stretch and flex. He thought of the beans downstairs, the note underlined once. He hoped the bag hadn’t felt like a line crossed. There was a difference between kindness and interference; he was always swinging between them like a kid on a rope over a creek, trying to land on the right side.
A floorboard creaked beneath them—the small, ordinary sound of someone settling into a couch. The building breathed. Matty played the loop one more time, then let it fade until the strings went quiet under his hand.
For a minute neither of them spoke. The night pressed its ear to the windows. Somewhere in the distance a siren rose and fell, more lullaby than warning at this time of night.
Ross cleared his throat. “You working the morning shift?”
“Open,” Matty said, hanging the guitar from its hook on the wall adjacent to their worn couch. “Gonna try that new latte recipe.”
“Twelve customers will tell you it’s the best latte they’ve ever had.”
“Thirteen. I’m very persuasive.”
“Are you a shop owner or a used car salesman?”
“Rude,” Matty said again, bitterly, but he was smiling now—a quick, unforced thing he didn’t have to hide.
He rinsed two cups at the sink and left them to dry. He thought of the paper bag downstairs, and the kettle that might boil, and the way steam found its own way out into the air. He thought of the neighbor who’d said thank you like a cautious step onto an iced over lake. He hoped she slept.
~*~
When the guitar faded, the room felt larger. Violet eased June into the bassinet and held her breath for three counts. No protest. The baby sprawled like a starfish, one fist still gripping the hem of Violet’s shirt. Violet lowered the tiny hand with the care of a bomb tech and stepped back.
For the first time all day, the minutes of quiet didn’t feel like a test. They felt like a pause.
She used this time like a person who’d earned it: rinsed a bottle, stacked two plates, turned the kettle on just to hear it click and cool again. She rubbed at the place between her eyebrows where worry liked to fold itself. In the quiet she could hear the small sounds—the radiator’s sigh, the street shushing itself.
On the counter, the paper bag waited. She unfolded it and poured the beans into a jar, the smell rising dark and floral. The note she slid into the cookbook drawer where you put things you’d like to find again later, on purpose, when you need them.
Her phone buzzed with a text she didn’t open. It could sit there. She’d given the right people her new address. She’d bought a thicker door chain and the little plug-in nightlight shaped like a moon. She’d moved her life into a space where she could see end to end and feel the edges.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered to the room, not as a vow, just a map. “Open the box with sheets. Call daycare for pricing. Call Mum with new schedule. Walk to the corner store.” There was ill optimism in the air that she would remember even one of those tasks with an infant.
June shifted and sighed. The guitar upstairs didn’t return. It didn’t need to.
Violet padded over to the front door. Her finger tips ghosted over the lock. Once. Twice. Three times until they moved to the thickened door chain, that Mr. Stein had installed for her and repeated, the same pattern. The door stop would be coming the next business day.
Violet lay on the air mattress and pulled a blanket over her legs. Her body hummed like a live wire finally cooling. She watched the window square and let her vision blur until the light peaking in from the courtyard was a distant smear. The small bedroom with the fresh painted walls felt more warm and cozy than the past two years at her in-laws large house in the suburbs ever did.
She didn’t pray, not anymore. She didn’t bargain. Not like she use to. But she did think a simple thing, plain and without ornament: let it be like this. Let it be this quiet. Let the worst be over, at least for tonight.
She turned on her side, toward the bassinet. June slept with her mouth open just a little, a pale half-moon. Violet’s heartbeat met the building’s and then, drowsily, the city’s. The last thought that stuck before sleep was not about her ex or the ER or the way trauma carved grooves she kept finding herself in. It was about the knock on the door and the silly paper bag and the easy smile of the guy upstairs who hadn’t asked for anything back. Not even her name.
“Okay,” she told the ceiling, welcoming much needed sleep. “Okay.”
~*~
Ross shut his laptop and stood, stretching until his spine cracked. He padded to the small shelf where their books lived—cookbooks, liner notes, a dictionary with most of its pages used to prop a crooked table in the shop downstairs—and slid his study guide between The Savoy Cocktail Book and a copy of The Little Prince with espresso stains.
“Up at six?” he questioned.
“Five,” Matty said. “Muffin day.”
“Don’t you mean biscuit day.”
“Exactly.”
They ran their small nightly rituals— jimmying the lock on the window so Mrs. DeLuca’s cat, Lucas wouldn’t enter and sleep on Ross’ head again. Followed by the lights, watering the plants from a beer glass Ross had stolen from a weekend shift at McGees. Matty paused above where the crying had subsided only an hour or so before. He didn’t press his ear to the floor. He didn’t do anything dramatic. He just stood there for a second with his hands on his hips and smiled.
“Don’t be weird,” Ross murmured with minty breath as he passed him in the narrow hall on the way to his bedroom.
“Never,” Matty said, and meant it, or tried to.
They turned off the last lamp. The apartment went soft around them. Downstairs, a woman and her daughter slept. Upstairs, two men who weren’t related and yet were family moved through the darkness like they knew where everything was.
On the kitchen counter, a stray coffee ring dried into a crescent. In the cupboard, a fresh bag of beans waited for morning.
~*~
The next morning arrived in pale gray light. The kettle hummed, and Violet’s phone was wedged between her shoulder and cheek while she measured formula with one hand. June kicked her feet on the counter in her baby seat, drooling on a stuffed rabbit that had seen better days. Violet had thought she had thrown it out. The stuffed rabbit probably wished it had been.
“—so if I take the Wednesday overnight,” Violet was saying, scrolling through the schedule the hospital had provided to her on her laptop, “could you also do Thursday morning? Just until I get back and nap a little?”
Her mother’s voice was bright and practical, the way it always was when there was a plan to be made, “Of course, honey. Bring the baby bag Wednesday night. I’ll keep her till lunch if you want to sleep” A pause of mother’s intuition before, “Are they treating you alright at the new place?”
Violet looked around at the apartment—the one curtain she’d managed to hang, the open cans of paint, the stack of boxes pretending to be a table, the little jar of coffee beans on the counter catching the light. “It’s… good. Quiet. I can see the courtyard from the window.”
“That’s good,” her mother said, gentle now. “You sound tired, but different tired.”
Violet smiled, stirring the formula absentmindedly. “Yeah. Not scared tired.”
A small pause, the kind her mother always left open for her to fill if she wanted. Violet never did.
A sigh. Another pause. Then, before she could stop herself:
“There’s this guy upstairs,” Violet blurted.
Her mom chuckled immediately. “Already? I was going to give it a few weeks before you met anyone cute.”
“No—God, not like that,” Violet said, rubbing her temple. “He just—he brought me coffee yesterday. Like, an actual bag of it. Said it was for early mornings or long nights or whatever that post-it said.”
“That’s sweet,” her mom said, voice soft.
Violet frowned. “Sweet? Mom, that’s… weird, right? Who just does that?”
“Nice people, maybe? He was probably just being neighborly, Vi.”
“Yeah, well,” Violet muttered, quieter now while she picked at her cuticle, “he was nice too. At first.”
Her mother’s voice gentled. “Honey…”
“I just don’t get it,” Violet went on. “Nobody does something for nothing. People always want something. And he doesn’t even know me. He could be—”
“Vi.” Her mother’s voice cut through gently but firmly. “This isn’t the same.”
Violet let out a breath. The kettle clicked off behind her, steam curling up in the sunlight.
Her mom went on. “You’ve been through something terrible. Of course you’re cautious. But not everyone who smiles is hiding something. Some people bring coffee because it’s the kind thing to do.”
Violet leaned her elbows on the counter, staring at the peeling laminate beneath her fingertips. “You really think that?”
“I do,” her mother said simply. “And you’ll know the difference next time. You already do, I think.”
Violet didn’t answer right away. June cooed from the window, one sock half-off, hair sticking up like she’d been electrocuted. Violet smiled despite herself. “He smells like it, you know. Coffee. Even through the floor sometimes. June likes it.”
Her mom’s laughter was soft and low. “Well, maybe that’s all he’s bringing into your life right now — warmth and caffeine. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”
“No,” Violet admitted. “It doesn’t.”
“Good. Take the small kindnesses, Vi. Not everyone’s out for something.”
Violet’s throat tightened at that. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess”
They talked for a few more minutes — about schedules, about bottles, about how much June was growing — and then said their goodbyes. When Violet hung up, the silence that followed wasn’t heavy. It was gentle.
She set her phone down, scooped June up, and pressed her nose to her daughter’s soft hair. From upstairs, faint as a memory, a familiar sound drifted through the ceiling — the rhythmic strum of a guitar.
Violet smiled, but caught herself before it could get too comfortable on her face. She had a lot to get done today and with that many tasks on her to do list she could not waste time arguing with herself over some boy.
“See?” she exhaled, ignoring the jar of beans that stared at her from the counter. “S’just coffee.”