Page 21 of The Quiet Tenant

You’re trying, but you have no idea how to do this. Nothing could have prepared you to sit in this man’s kitchen, dredge up the friendly parts of you, and offer them to his daughter.

“I’m Rachel,” you tell her.

She nods. “Cecilia.”

“Nice to meet you.”

She smiles briefly. Her dad walks to the kitchen counter, picks up the coffee carafe, and returns to sit at the table. He turns to her.

“Sleep well?”

She nods, eyes on her empty plate. Dimly, you remember what you were like in the mornings at her age: always tired, never hungry, certainly never in the mood to talk. Her father pours himself a cup of coffee, then sets the pot at the edge of your place mat. Telling you, directing you to help yourself. You fill the mug in front of you. It’s only when you bring it up to your lips that you notice the words printed on the other side of the ceramic:best dad everin large black letters.

At the breakfast table, the best dad ever reaches for a strand of his daughter’s hair. He brings it up to her nose and moves it up and down, poking at her nostril. At first, she doesn’t react. Around the third poke, she swats him away gently, laughs as if against her better judgment.

“Stop it!”

He smiles, partly to her and partly to himself. A father and his daughter, comfortable around each other.

He loves her. It’s obvious, even to you.

The thing with love: it can make people weak.

While they’re distracted, you close your eyes and swallow your first sip of coffee in years. The taste knocks you back in time to your last morning, the day he took you. Before that, a summer internship in a newsroom, tired employees inserting pods into a machine wellinto the afternoon. And through it all, every visit at a coffee shop. When it came to coffee, you remember now, you were never faithful. You tried every drink imaginable, plain drip, flat white with an extra shot, latte with hazelnut syrup, cappuccino with extra foam. Refusing to commit. Wanting to try everything the world had to offer.

When you open your eyes again, the kid is reading the back of the butter container.Act normally.You reach for a slice of toast, drop it onto your plate. Glance at the best dad ever, wait for his wordless approval before you pick up a dull knife. His daughter relinquishes her reading material and you spread butter on your bread. You add a layer of jelly like it’s nothing, like this isn’t the first time in five years that you get to decide how much you’re going to have of a given food. As ceremoniously as you can without raising suspicion, you take a bite.

A sharp pain bites at the edges of your gums. The jelly is so sweet it sticks to the back of your throat. You haven’t seen a dentist in ages. You don’t want to think about the mess inside. Cavities, gingivitis, a mouth that would ooze blood if you were to floss. The toast hurts, but it’s also warm and crunchy and the butter is partially melted and you are so fucking ravenous, so hungry you forgot what it feels like to be sated. Maybe you’ve been storing hunger, somewhere between your hollow stomach and the knots of your hip bones, and you won’t be able to stop eating until you’ve made up for every calorie you missed out on in the shed.

“Do you have that note for Ms.Newman?”

A father’s voice brings you back to the kitchen. To your hands on the table, to your feet on the floor, to this man and his daughter and their perfectly nice morning routine. Cecilia confirms that she does, in fact, have that note for Ms.Newman. There’s more chitchat between the two of them, inquiries about an upcoming test, confirmation that Cecilia will go to art class tonight and that he will pick her up at five-thirty.

You didn’t know fathers could act this way. No matter how far back you search, you can’t remember yours ever making you breakfast, playing with your hair, knowing your teachers’ names and your class schedule. Your father left for work early and came back afterdinner wearing a nice suit, briefcase in hand, tired but happy. He made time for you and your brother, for game days and school plays, for Sunday afternoons in the park. But you were an item on a to-do list. Even as a child, you sensed that if no one reminded him of this particular mission, fatherhood might slip his mind, your childhood like a dry-cleaning item no one had bothered to pick up.

The best dad ever empties his coffee mug. His daughter gives up on the slice of toast she tried to munch on. They get up. He tells her, “Five minutes,” and she tells him she knows and disappears upstairs. As soon as the sound of the bathroom door shutting reaches the kitchen, he turns to you.

“Come. Now.”

He signals for you to walk in front of him and up the stairs. He follows closely, his body brushing against yours. You make your way back to the bedroom. He doesn’t have to tell you to position yourself near the radiator. You sit on the floor and lift your right hand. He retrieves the handcuffs from his pocket, secures one loop around your wrist, the other around the metallic pipe. He slides it up and down, makes sure the mechanism is secure.

“I have to take her to school, and then I have to go to work. Now, look.”

He takes out his phone. You’ve never seen it before. It has a much larger screen than the ones you remember from five years ago.

“I have cameras. In this room, at the front door, everywhere. Hidden. They link to an app in here.” He gives the screen a few taps, then turns it in your direction. It’s not the camera feed—he won’t show that to you. That would give too much away. It’s an online video. A demo.

He plays it with just a whisper of sound. It shows the entrance to a house. A woman opens and shuts the door. You see it, you hear it. A red icon pops up in the bottom right corner of the screen.

You absorb the house and the door and the woman hired to walk into a home that’s not really hers. The technology. The menace of his eyes and ears on you.

Your jaw tightens. The shed. He didn’t have eyes in the shed. Not while he was away. You could read, in the shed. You could lie down.You could sit up. You could do these things, and he didn’t know when or how you did them. It wasn’t much but it was something, and that something belonged to you.

This was supposed to be better,you want to say, and immediately you want to curse yourself for thinking that way.Betterisn’t something he lets you have.Betteris a fairy tale.

The screen goes dark. He locks it again.

“If you do anything—if you scream or move and I see anyone coming over to check things out, I’ll get a notification. And I won’t be happy.” He glances at the bedroom window, obscured by a drawn shade. “I work close to here. Do you understand?”

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