with unnecessary questions.

Forty minutes later, I tightened the new fitting, turned the water back on, and waited.

No drip.

She exhaled slowly.

I wiped my hands on a rag and told her she was all set.

She thanked me with a seriousness that felt bigger than the leak.

I said it was no big deal, just neighbor stuff.

That was when something shifted in her face.

She looked at me like I had accidentally put my hand on a bruise.

I started packing my tools.

She asked if I wanted water or coffee.

Said she even had decaf.

I told her I should probably get back.

She nodded, turned toward the stairs, then stopped with one hand on the railing.

She looked back over her shoulder and said, very quietly, ‘You came just for me.’

For a second I thought she meant the repair.

Then I saw her face and knew she didn’t.

I stood up too fast and nearly hit my head.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘You called me.’

She looked down at the damp floor, then back at me.

There was something raw in her expression, something that made the room feel smaller.

‘That’s not usually how it works,’ she said.

I should have gone home.

Instead, ten minutes later I was sitting in her kitchen with a mug of decaf going cold in my hands while rain ticked softly against the window over the sink.

Her kitchen was warm in a lived-in way my house never was.

Ceramic bowl of clementines on the counter.

Mail stacked neatly beside a cookbook.

A dish towel hanging straight from the oven handle like even the small things in her house tried to stay composed.

She told me her divorce had been final a little over two years.

Her ex, Dean, had left after twenty-four years of marriage and a long stretch of pretending everything was normal.

He had moved in with a woman not much older than me before the papers were even signed.

Kora didn’t cry while she told me that.

That almost made it harder to hear.

She said after Dean left, people still knocked, but never for her.

They came for signatures.

They came to ask whether she was keeping the house.

They came because Brett had asked someone to check on her.

They came because they wanted information, reassurance, gossip, or a version of the story they could repeat later.

‘Nobody comes because I matter,’ she said, then immediately looked embarrassed for saying it aloud.

I didn’t know what smart thing to say.

So I told her the truth.

‘I almost didn’t even put my shoes on before I grabbed my bag.’

She held my gaze for a second too long, and that was the first moment I realized I was in trouble.

The next morning there was a loaf pan on my porch with banana bread wrapped in foil and a sticky note that said, For the emergency plumber next door.

No heart.

No smiley face.

Just neat handwriting and enough effort to keep me thinking about her all day.

After that, small things started happening.

She texted to ask whether a porch light bulb needed a special base.

I walked over and changed it in thirty seconds.

A week later she asked whether a