Turn 2 · The Landlord's Clause

The pen fits in your pocket with a weight that seems deliberate, as if it knows where it is going. You leave the folio closed on the kitchen table—a small mercy, or a small cowardice, you are not sure which. The stairs to Flat 2 are narrow, the carpet worn to the weave in the center where decades of tenants have climbed. Your hand finds the banister where the varnish has gone satin-smooth from palms like yours, uncertain, gripping too hard.

You knock. The sound is dull, absorbed by the old door with its four panels and its brass letter slot. From inside, nothing. Then a chair scrapes against wood, deliberately, and footsteps approach with a slowness that is its own message. The door opens to the length of its chain, and Daniel Ferris fills the gap. He is taller than you remember from the stair this morning, or perhaps he is simply closer now, close enough that you can smell the cigarette smoke in his wool jumper and see the yellow of his eyes, the small broken vessels in the whites.

"The landlady," he says. Not a greeting. A classification. His gaze drops to your pocket, where the pen makes a visible line against your hip, and something flickers—recognition, or its opposite, a man who has learned not to acknowledge what power looks like until it speaks first.

"Come to discuss the rent, have you? Or have you found the clause that lets you write me solvent?"

The chain does not move. Behind him, the flat is dim, curtains drawn against the afternoon, and you can make out the corner of a mattress on the floor, a stack of unopened post, the particular archaeology of a life in collapse. He is waiting for you to be the thing he expects: soft, apologetic, easily deferred. The pen presses against your thigh like a finger pointing.

"I came to see what I'm working with," you say, and your voice sounds borrowed, the register of someone who knows how to end sentences with periods instead of question marks. "Before I decide what kind of landlord I am."