She would shake her head.
“Did I scare you?”
Another shake.
“Did somebody at school say something?”
Nothing.
At 7:18 p.m. on the fifth night, I wrote it down in the notes app on my phone because my nurse brain would not let it go. No sound. No explanation. Tears only when alone with me.
By the second week, I had three timestamps. 6:42 a.m., kitchen doorway. 9:11 p.m., upstairs hall. 4:03 p.m., laundry room.
I hated that I was documenting my own home like an incident report, but I had learned the hard way that memory gets soft when people with smooth voices start denying things.
When I told Maris, she barely looked up from her laptop.
“She just doesn’t like you,” she said.
The words were light. Too light.
“She cries, Maris.”
“She’s dramatic when she wants attention.” Maris closed one tab, opened another, and smiled like this was all settled. “Don’t let her manipulate you. Little girls figure out very fast which adults are easy.”
I looked toward the hallway. Lumi was standing there with one hand wrapped around the strap of her backpack, her knuckles pale.
“She’s seven,” I said.
“And seven-year-olds can be mean,” Maris replied. “Trust me. I’m her mother.”
That should have comforted me.
It didn’t.
Three weeks after I moved in, Maris left for a business trip. She kissed my cheek in the driveway while the engine of the SUV rattled under her suitcase and a small American flag on the neighbor’s porch snapped in the cold wind. Lumi watched from the front window, pale behind the glass.
“Don’t make a big production out of dinner,” Maris called, sliding behind the wheel. “She’ll say she isn’t hungry. She’ll say her stomach hurts. Ignore it.”
I stood there with my paper coffee cup cooling in my hand and watched the SUV pull away.
Inside, the house felt too quiet.
At 5:36 p.m., I made grilled cheese and tomato soup because it was the least complicated meal I knew that still felt like somebody cared. I set Lumi’s bowl on the kitchen table and sat across from her, leaving my hands where she could see them.
She stared at the soup.
“You don’t have to talk,” I said. “But you do have to eat something.”
Her spoon moved once. Then stopped.
The radiator clicked. A school bus rolled past outside, brakes hissing at the corner. Somewhere in the house, Maris’s old wall clock kept ticking like it was counting down to something neither of us had named.
Lumi’s eyes filled again.
For one ugly second, I felt frustration rise in me—not at her, but at the wall between us. I wanted answers. I wanted to call Maris and demand them. I wanted to say, enough, this is my house too now.
