I was up before seven.
No alarm, no reason. Just the restlessness of a Saturday that had arrived before I'd figured out what to do with it. I got up, pulled on a shirt, moved to the kitchen.
The kettle. The eggs. The pan. The routine doing what routines do.
The kitchen was small — it had always been small. Counter along one wall, stove, a narrow corridor between the island and the cabinets that two people could navigate if they were paying attention. One person at seven in the morning was fine.
I set the bowl down. Started.
I heard her before I saw her.
Unhurried footsteps in the hallway — the specific sound of Maya in the morning, which I knew without thinking about it. She came through the doorway still in the oversized shirt she slept in, hair loose, not fully assembled. The particular state of someone who hadn't needed to be anywhere yet and hadn't pretended otherwise.
She saw me and stopped for a half second.
"You're up early," she said.
"Couldn't sleep."
She moved to the counter without ceremony — the far end, reaching for the kettle before realizing I'd already filled it. Checked it anyway and set it back down. Looked at the window. Looked at the bowl.
"What are you making?"
"Eggs."
She looked at the pan. Then at me briefly, the assessing glance she used when she was deciding something she'd already mostly decided.
"I'll do toast," she said.
Not a question. Just a statement of what was going to happen.
She found the bread. I turned back to the stove. The pan was heating, the eggs needed another minute, and for a moment the kitchen had its own logic — two people moving through it with the separate purpose of parallel tasks, each occupying a different part of the small room. Functional.
Manageable.
Then she reached past me for the toaster.
Not far past — just across, her arm moving into the counter space I'd been using, her shoulder close enough that I registered the warmth before I registered the proximity. I shifted slightly to give her room.
She didn't shift.
She set the toaster down and stayed where she was, dropping the bread in, pushing the lever. Her elbow was maybe four inches from mine. The pan was heating properly now and I focused on it — the edges, the temperature, whether it needed oil.
It needed oil.
I reached for the bottle on the shelf above the stove.
She reached for the spatula on the same shelf at the same moment — her hand arriving a beat after mine, close enough that the adjustment was immediate and small and neither of us mentioned it. She took the spatula. I took the oil. We both looked at what we were doing.
Neither of us said anything about it.
The toast went down. The eggs went in. The kitchen filled with the sounds and smells of a morning that had its own momentum now — the sizzle from the pan, the low gurgle of the kettle reaching temperature, the warmth of a small room with two heat sources and not much ventilation. Outside the window the light was starting to commit to something.
She stayed at the counter beside me.
Not at the far end, not behind me — beside me, in the narrow space between the island and the stove, her phone in one hand but not looking at it. Looking at the pan vaguely, the way you look at something that doesn't need watching but gives your eyes somewhere to be while you're standing close to someone and not talking about it.
I moved the eggs around the pan. She reached across me for the salt without announcing it — the unhurried kind of reach, the kind that assumed the space was available. Her arm came across my eyeline and I stopped moving for a second, just to not be moving while she was reaching. She found the salt shaker. Retreated.
"Sorry," she said.
Automatically. Not looking up.
"It's fine," I said.
We stood there for a moment with the eggs cooking between us and the toast not yet done and the kitchen holding everything slightly more still than usual.
I turned to check the toast.
She was closer than I expected.
Not dramatically — she'd shifted slightly at some point, weight moving toward the stove for no particular reason I could identify. But I'd turned with the assumption of space and found her inside it instead, and for a moment neither of us corrected it.
Her eyes came up.
Half a second — the startled kind, the expression that arrives before you've decided what to do with your face. I saw her register the distance between us, which was less than either of us had apparently been tracking.
Something moved across her expression — not readable, not quite, gone before I could name it.
She looked back at the toast.
"Almost done," she said.
Her voice was even. The words were correct.
I looked at the eggs.
"Yeah," I said.
I stepped back to the stove. She stayed where she was — one beat too long — and then the toaster clicked and she moved to it like that had always been the plan. Pulled the toast out. Set it on the plate with the efficient ease she brought to things she'd decided to treat as ordinary.
The sound of the toaster had broken something that neither of us had named.
She transferred the toast to a plate. Picked up her phone, checked it, set it back down. The kind of sequence that meant she'd remembered something — not urgently, just back into her day.
"I've got a client call in a bit," she said. "Weekend deadline. I should prep."
"Sure," I said.
She took her plate. Moved to the counter for her phone. Paused there for a second — not long, just the beat of someone making sure they had everything — and then left the kitchen the way she'd entered it. Unhurried. No announcement. The particular ease of someone who had already moved on, or was doing a convincing impression of it.
I listened to her cross the living room. The sound of her door. The quiet that settled after.
I ate standing at the counter.
The kitchen felt larger now, which didn't make sense because nothing had changed. Same counter. Same stove. Same window, the light finally deciding on something pale and flat, not quite morning but past pretending otherwise.
I finished the eggs. Rinsed the plate. Stood there with the water running for a moment longer than I needed to.
The spatula she'd used was still on the counter. The salt shaker slightly out of place from where it usually sat. Small displacements — the kind a space accumulated when two people had been in it and one had left.
I turned the tap off.
The kitchen held its quiet around me. I stood in it for a while, not because I had anything left to do in here, not because I was waiting for anything.
Just because the alternative was moving on, and I wasn't quite ready to do that yet.
I checked the time.
Got ready for the rest of the day.