R O M A N

I noticed her on a Tuesday.

Not because I was looking. I was never looking — not for anything except what needed to be watched and managed and kept at a careful distance. I had built an entire life around not looking at things that did not require my attention.

She required nothing from me.

That was the problem.

I heard her before I saw her. A sound through the wall at 6am — movement, unhurried, domestic. The specific sound of someone who woke up and was glad about it. I had not heard that sound in three years. I had forgotten it was a sound people made.

Then I saw her in the hallway on a Tuesday.

She was turning the corner to our floor and she had a bag on each shoulder and a plant tucked under one arm and a set of keys in her mouth because her hands were full and she was still — somehow, inexplicably — humming. Not a song I recognized. Just sound. Just warmth made audible.

She looked up and saw me at my mailbox and she smiled.

Not a polite smile. Not the smile people give strangers in hallways — that thin, careful thing that means I see you and I will now look away. She smiled like she meant it. Like she had been waiting to and I had just given her the excuse.

I looked at her once.

I went back inside.

I stood in my apartment with my mail in my hand and I thought: that is going to be a problem.

I was right. I am always right about these things. It is one of the few consistencies I have managed to hold onto — the ability to assess a situation clearly, without sentiment, without the distortion of wanting things to be different from what they are.

She was going to be a problem.

So I did what I always do with problems. I catalogued her. I noted her schedule — leaving at 7:15am, home between 4 and 4:30, later on Tuesdays. I noted the sounds she made: the humming, the one-sided conversations with things that could not answer back, the laugh on the phone that was too big for the hallway walls. I noted the plant she left outside her door. Then another. Then seven more over three weeks until the entrance to apartment 4A looked like the beginning of something growing.

I catalogued all of it.

I told myself this was standard. Proximity assessment. Knowing your environment. Knowing who shares your walls and your floor and the small, involuntary intimacies of apartment living.

I told myself a lot of things in those first weeks.

I was lying to myself. I knew I was lying to myself. I continued anyway because the alternative — the word underneath all of it, the word I was refusing to look at directly — was something I had decided three years ago I would never use again.

She left soup outside my door on a Wednesday night.

I opened my door thirteen seconds after hers closed. I looked at the container. I told myself I was going to throw it away. I took it inside. I ate the whole thing standing at my kitchen counter at 11pm in the dark because sitting down would have made it feel like something it was not.

It was the best thing I had eaten in three years.

I kept the bowl.

I cannot explain that. I have stopped trying.

Here is what I knew, on that Tuesday when she smiled at me in the hallway:

I had spent three years being no one. Deliberately, carefully, completely no one. I had taken everything I was — the name, the network, the weight of being known in rooms that mattered — and I had set it down. Not destroyed it. You cannot destroy something like that. You can only put it somewhere quiet and walk away and hope it stays quiet.

It stayed quiet.

Until her.

Not because of anything she did. Not because she found out something she should not have, not because she asked questions, not because she looked at me with the particular suspicion that people sometimes have when they sense something underneath the surface of a person.

She did not suspect anything.

She just left soup outside my door and named a plant after me and knocked on the wall at midnight when she could not sleep and talked to me through it without expecting an answer and somehow — without trying, without knowing, without doing anything except being exactly and completely herself — she made the quiet thing loud again.

I noticed her on a Tuesday.

I should have looked away.

I did not look away.

And now there is a man three cities over who has been watching me for three years and waiting for exactly this — for me to let something matter, for me to give him something to reach for.

He is patient.

He is going to find out that I am more patient.

And that there are things you do not touch.

She is one of them.

She does not know that yet.

She will.

— Roman Voss, apartment 4B, fourth floor

Six weeks before everything started.

🥀 Welcome to VOSS. I hope you stayed up for this one.

---

✦ Author's Note ✦

Thanks for reading, loves. 🖤

He doesn't say much. But I hope this prologue said enough.

If you felt something — vote, comment, let me know. I write faster when I know you're here.

♡ Want the next chapter now? ♡

VOSS updates early on my Scrollstack at @[YourHandle].

Roman is waiting. 🥀