4344.40 · February 9, 2024 AD
We Don't Make Problems
The stairwell is dark. The timed light clicked off minutes ago. Above her, a door opens and closes—controlled, quiet, the particular sound of someone pressing a latch back with their thumb to avoid the click. Then footsteps descending. Confident. Not fumbling for the switch. Moving the way someone moves through a space they know well enough to navigate blind. Mira stays motionless on the landing. The footsteps reach the turn. A shape materialises. And suddenly the empty flat on the fourth floor isn't empty at all.
Number 7 has been vacant for as long as Mira's lived here. No name on the letterbox. No shoes outside the door. No cooking smells, no water through the pipes, none of the small audible evidence of habitation you learn to read when you share a building. She's walked past that door hundreds of times in four years. Always closed. Always silent.
The door opens now. Closes. The particular sound of someone who doesn't want the sound to carry.
In the dark stairwell, a man descends. Farhad Rezaei. The building's owner. She's met him perhaps five times—the lease signing, a plumbing emergency, brief exchanges in passing. He doesn't live here. Doesn't live in Istanbul full-time. Expensive coat, expensive watch, the particular confidence of men who own things.
He stops one step above her. Too close for the width of the stairwell. There's a smell underneath his cologne—sharp, chemical, nothing she can name.
"Mira. Mira Hanım. Hello."
He mentions the late rent. Mentions being good neighbours. His smile arrives all at once, technically perfect.
"We don't make problems," he says. Like it's filler. Like it means nothing at all.
