She knew my coffee order before I told her. She knew my mother’s name before I mentioned it. By the third week, I started wondering what else she knew — and how long she had been watching before we met.
Her name was Lena. Or at least, that is what she told me.
I moved into the building on a grey Saturday in March. Sixth floor, apartment 14, a one-bedroom with good light and a radiator that clicked all night like a metronome. I had chosen it quickly, after a difficult year, the way you choose things when you just want to stop moving.
The hallway was empty when I carried the first box in. By the second trip, she was there.
Lena, from apartment 16. Late thirties, dark coat, a thermos held in both hands like an offering. She smiled and said, “You take it black, don’t you — the coffee.”
I did. I thought perhaps she had seen me on the street, had noticed me at the corner café. I thanked her and thought nothing more of it.
That was my first mistake.
She was warm and easy to talk to, which is more dangerous than it sounds. Within a week I had told her things I hadn’t planned to tell anyone — about the job I had left, about my ex-partner, about my mother’s illness. Lena listened the way very few people do, with her whole face, asking the right questions at the right moments.
She never offered much in return. Where she worked, she was vague. Where she was from, she smiled and said “everywhere, really.” She had no photographs on her walls, I noticed, the one time she invited me in for tea. No letters on the counter. No clutter of a lived life.
She had furniture. She had cups. She had almost nothing else.
I told myself she was private. I told myself I had only been there once.
The third week, she mentioned my mother by name.
“How is Ruth doing?” she asked, in the lift, as though she had known her for years.
I stopped. I was almost certain I had never said my mother’s name aloud to Lena. I had said my mother. I had said she. I had not said Ruth.
“She’s the same,” I said carefully. “How did you know her name?”
Lena looked briefly, genuinely puzzled. “You told me,” she said. “Last Tuesday. In the hall.”
I had not been home last Tuesday. I had been at my mother’s, four hours away, and I had not come back until Wednesday morning.
Lena smiled at me, the way she always smiled. Steady, warm, unreadable.
“I must be mixing it up with someone else,” she said. “Forgive me.”
The lift doors opened and she stepped out and I stood inside it for a moment after she had gone.
I started keeping a log. A small notebook I carried everywhere, recording exactly what I told Lena and exactly when. I am an organised person by nature — it’s what my job had required before everything fell apart — and the act of writing it down made me feel less like I was losing my mind.
Within five days the log showed three more things Lena knew that I had not told her.
The name of my ex-partner. The town I grew up in. The fact that I had left my last job under a settlement agreement, which I had told no one, not even my closest friends.
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