Turn 4 of 11

Go upstairs and ask Marchetti if she wrote the rule

You leave your toast on the counter like a sacrifice to the kitchen gods and head for the stairs. The stairwell smells like Marchetti's flat always smells — sandalwood and something herbal, incense or a candle, the kind of thing that makes your sinuses feel like they're at a spa. You've been up here maybe four times in two years. Marchetti keeps her door locked and her curtains drawn and her business to herself, which you've always respected because you do the same, but right now you need answers and the handwriting on the board wasn't Dermot's blocky scrawl and it wasn't Jake's half-formed printing and it wasn't yours.

You knock. Three times, firm, the way you knock when you need someone to answer.

Nothing. Then footsteps, and the door opens a crack, and Marchetti's face appears — dark eyes, hair pulled back, the expression of a woman who wasn't expecting company and isn't sure she wants any. She's wearing a jumper that's too big for her, which is unusual, because Marchetti dresses like she might be photographed at any moment. She looks tired. Not haven't-slept tired. Something else.

"Priya," she says. Not a question, not a greeting. Just your name, placed there like a card on a table.

"Can I come in?"

She hesitates. It's a small hesitation — half a breath — but you catch it, because you've been catching things lately that other people don't. She steps back and lets the door swing wide. The flat is the mirror image of yours but it feels like a different country. Clean surfaces, books stacked by the wall, a window letting in thin morning light. No whiteboard. No passive-aggressive milk notes. Just order, and quiet, and the fading smell of incense.

"Were you in our kitchen this morning?" you ask, because there's no point dressing it up.

Marchetti leans against the kitchen counter and folds her arms. She doesn't answer right away. She looks at you the way she looked at the board last week when she came down to read it — that strange expression you couldn't place then and can barely place now. Not confused. Interested. Like someone watching a game they've just realised they're playing.

"I went down to get post," she says. "There was post."

"Did you write on the board?"

"Which bit?" she says, and the fact that she says WHICH BIT and not WHAT BOARD tells you everything and nothing at the same time.