I didn’t think twice when Nadia asked. Maybe I should have.

“It’s just for a week,” she said over the phone, her voice all sugar and urgency, like it always had been. And because my house is too big for one person and because saying no felt colder than I wanted to admit, I said yes.

Now she’s here, standing in my living room with a duffel bag that looks far too small for someone supposedly displaced by a breakup. She drops it with a careless thud, her eyes scanning my shelves, my framed photos, the chipped mug on the table.

“Feels the same,” she says, like she’s been here before. She hasn’t. Not this house, not this space. But I laugh anyway, because what else do you do?

We sit. We talk. She takes the seat I always use. The lamp behind her head glows like a halo, though the smirk she wears doesn’t match the light.

It’s harmless, I tell myself. Old friends slipping back into rhythm. I remember how people used to call us twins in college - Diana and Nadia, same letters, different order. We used to think it was funny. Now the memory doesn’t make me smile.

Later, after the dishes from our thrown-together pasta dinner are stacked in the sink, I retreat to my room. I read, or try to, though my eyes keep dragging to the clock. Past eleven. Past twelve. Eventually, I drift into the shallow kind of sleep that isn’t rest so much as waiting.

A sound pulls me up - faint, metallic, like something shifting in the kitchen. I hold my breath, listening. Another clink.

Barefoot, I slip out of bed and pad down the hall. The house is too quiet except for that tiny disturbance, steady now, deliberate. My hand hovers over the light switch, but I don’t flip it. I don’t want to give myself away.

I turn the corner.

Nadia is standing in the dark kitchen, motionless, her back to me. The open refrigerator casts her in cold blue light. She doesn’t flinch when I whisper her name. She just turns her head slowly, the edge of her smile visible in the glow.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

The fridge hums. The door swings shut. The kitchen is swallowed in darkness.

Continue reading (Chapter-2) » Little Shifts