Turn 5 of 11

Ask her what 'host' means to her

You take a breath. The sandalwood is doing something to your head, or maybe it's just that you haven't eaten and your toast is going stale on the counter one floor below. You press on.

"The bit about the host. HOST'S DECISION IS FINAL. What does that mean to you?"

Marchetti's arms stay folded but her fingers tighten on her sleeves. She pulls the oversized jumper tighter at the front, and you notice — not for the first time — that she looks smaller than usual. Not diminished in the way a person looks when they're embarrassed or caught out. Diminished like she's been losing something she can't name. The jumper isn't a fashion choice. It's armour.

"It means what it says," she says. "The host decides things. Final say. You know — if there's a dispute about the flat, the quiet hours, whatever. The host's word goes."

"And who's the host?"

She looks at you for a long moment. Her eyes are dark and careful, and you can see her deciding something — how much to give you, how much to hold back. She's not like Dermot. Dermot's face is an open book with half the pages torn out. Marchetti's is a locked diary with a fake lock on the front and a real one somewhere else entirely.

"I don't know," she says. "That's the problem."

"What do you mean, that's the problem?"

She pushes off the counter and walks to the window. The thin morning light catches the side of her face. Outside, the street below is just waking up — a delivery van, someone's bins being dragged to the kerb. Normal sounds. Flat sounds. She looks out at them like she's checking the weather in a country she's visiting.

"I mean," she says slowly, "that I wrote it, and I don't know who the host is."

The sentence lands in the room like a stone dropped into a well. You wait for the splash. Marchetti turns back to face you, and her expression has shifted — not softer, but rawer, like she's pulled back a layer she usually keeps buttoned.

"I wrote it last night," she says. "I went down for water about midnight. The board just said the rent thing and the bins. I wrote the quiet hours and the host rule. I thought — I thought if I wrote it, I'd be the host. Because I wrote it. Because it was my rule."

"And?"

"And I'm not."

She says it flatly, the way you'd say the sky is blue or the rent is due. She wrote a rule creating a position of authority, wrote it in her own hand, and the position filled itself with nobody. Like the board took her words and kept the power for itself.