Turn 8 of 11

Wait for Marchetti and see what she does when she reads the board

You stay where you are. Jake leans against the fridge, drinking his milk, humming something tuneless and half-remembered, and you watch the doorway the way a person watches a door in a film when they know something's coming through it. The footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs and pause. A beat of silence that stretches just long enough to become deliberate. Then Marchetti walks in.

She doesn't look at you first. She looks at the board. Her eyes move across it the way someone reads a text they've been dreading — quick, hungry, bracing for the blow. You watch her take in the rent rule, the quiet hours, the host clause she wrote herself at midnight. Then her gaze drops to the last line. PRIYA IS THE HOST. Your handwriting. Your scrawl.

Something moves across her face. Not surprise — she's too careful for surprise, or maybe she already guessed. It's more like watching someone adjust a calculation in real time. Her eyes flick to you, and there it is: that strange, precise expression she wore upstairs, the one that isn't confusion but something next door to it.

"Right," she says. Just the one word. She folds her arms, and the oversized jumper swallows her hands.

Jake glances between you and Marchetti with the cheerful blankness of a man watching a tennis match he doesn't know the score of.

"You've seen it, then. Priya's in charge now."

"I can see that, Jake."

"Cool." He rinses his glass — no, he doesn't, he puts it on the counter unwashed — and stretches.

"I'm going to unpack. Work at twelve." He ambles out, and for a moment you're alone with Marchetti in the kitchen, and the silence is a different kind of silence than the one upstairs. Thicker. Closer.

"You went straight down and wrote your name," Marchetti says. Not an accusation. An observation. She's looking at the board again, at your handwriting, and you can see her reading it the way she read her own — looking for the catch, the thing the board took and kept.

"You knew I would," you say, because she did. She told you just enough to send you running.

"I told you what happened to me. What you did with it was your business." She unfolds her arms, and for a second she looks exposed — thinner, tireder, the jumper hanging off her shoulders. The rent change. You've been saving ninety-three quid a month and Marchetti's been paying it, and until this moment you hadn't once let yourself picture her face about it.

She steps toward the board. Toward the marker on its string. Her hand doesn't reach for it. But it's close.