Chapter 5: Routine

A week had settled over the apartment like dust, fine and pervasive. Not unpleasant dust. Just dust.

I woke on Thursday to the sound of Kael moving through the kitchen, which had become as reliable as my alarm. He was up before sunrise—I had stopped asking why, stopped noticing the strangeness of it around day three. The coffee was made by the time my feet hit the cold floor. A small act of consideration that had calcified into something I no longer registered as remarkable. I took my mug from the cupboard and did not thank him. He did not acknowledge my presence. This was how we operated.

The apartment had become a matter of choreography. He occupied the kitchen table. I occupied the couch and the bedroom and the narrow hallway between. We moved around each other with the precision of dancers who had memorized the steps but refused to make eye contact. No one bumped into anyone. No one apologized. It was, I had come to realize, functional.

I showered. Dressed. Checked my phone for messages from the office. By the time I left for Aldridge & Fenn, Kael had settled at the kitchen table with a book—some thick, unidentifiable volume bound in burgundy leather. I had begun leaving articles there for him. Law review pieces, contract analyses, historical precedents on binding agreements. I did not explain why. He did not ask. He simply read them, and when I came home the next day, there were Post-it notes flagged to the margins.

Not commentary. Never commentary. Just citations. Precise bibliographic references to related material, always meticulously formatted, always correct. I had checked three of them against the library database just to be sure, and each one was exactly where he said it was. The last one included the page number where a particular clause appeared in an 1891 legal treatise on infernal law that I was not even sure existed until I searched for it.

I had not thanked him for any of the Post-its. He had not said you are welcome. This seemed like a reasonable arrangement.

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Work was small and solid and blessedly uncomplicated.

A pharma company had breach-of-contract claims against a supply chain partner, and I spent the morning parsing the definitions section to prove that "quarterly" did not mean the same thing to both parties. It did not. One party had meant calendar quarters. The other had meant operational cycles. It was almost funny—the kind of stupid mistake that cost people money, that tied up courts, that justified my entire salary.

I sat in my office on the thirty-fourth floor with the Chicago skyline mapped across the windows, and I made notes in my careful handwriting, and I did not think about ancient demons or binding clauses or why someone—something—would spend 150 years in a one-bedroom apartment on the North Shore.

Except, at lunch, in the break room, while I was reheating yesterday's leftover pasta, I did think about it. Janet from litigation came in and made noise about her dating app, and I did not tell her that I was currently living with something that had been old before her great-grandfather was born. I ate my pasta and nodded at the right moments and felt, distantly, that I was a very good liar.

I left at seven. The evening traffic on Lake Shore Drive was backed up to a standstill, and I had time to think, which I did my best not to do.

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When I got home, I found him still at the kitchen table. The burgundy book had been replaced by another one, this one navy with gold lettering. The apartment smelled like tea—Earl Grey, if I had to guess, though he had not asked permission to make tea in my kitchen. I decided not to care about that.

I changed into sweats. Set up my laptop on the couch. Spread out the Pembroke contract and began the tedious work of cross-referencing clauses against the SOW attachments. It was nearly eleven when I looked up.

Kael was still at the kitchen table. The lamp beside him cast his profile in sharp relief—the sharp line of his jaw, the formal set of his shoulders. He turned a page with careful precision and did not look at me.

"How long have you been doing this?" I asked.

He did not look up. "Doing what, precisely?"

"The Post-it notes. The citations. The—" I gestured vaguely, which he could not see. "All of it."

He turned another page. "One hundred and fifty years."

I stopped. My fingers stilled on the keyboard. For a moment, I thought he meant the Post-it notes specifically, and I was about to point out, in a very thorough and lawyerly manner, that Post-it notes had not been invented until 1974, and therefore—

Then I realized what he actually meant.

One hundred and fifty years. Not the Post-its. The clause. The whole thing. The maintenance of it, the staying present in the mortal realm, the quiet presence in kitchens and living rooms and apartments across a century and a half. The waiting, the reading, the courtesy that was not performance.

I thought about that for a moment.

"The statute of limitations on this contract would be truly impressive," I said, and went back to my laptop.

I did not hear him smile. He made no sound at all. But the quality of the silence changed—just slightly—and I did not look up to confirm it.

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At twelve-thirty, I closed my laptop and stood on legs that had forgotten how to straighten. The apartment was quiet except for the ambient hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of traffic on the street below. I walked to the kitchen doorway and stopped.

Kael was still reading.

"Do you sleep?" I asked.

"No."

"What do you do at night?"

"I read."

"What if you run out of books?"

He turned a page with the same careful precision he brought to everything. "That has not happened yet."

I nodded, though I was not sure what I was acknowledging. I went to bed and lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the faint sound of pages turning in the kitchen, a metronome of patience that I still could not quite name.