She was on the couch when I woke up.

Not still there from the night before. She'd been on the couch, then the bedroom, and at some point before the alarm she'd come back out with her phone. The couch was hers now. Same way the left side of the sink was hers. Neither of us had marked it happening.

I made coffee. She didn't look up.

---

The thing from last night hadn't gone away. I could see it in how she was sitting. Not the loose stillness she had when she was thinking. This was held. A position she was keeping on purpose.

Smaller than last night. Not gone.

---

I made eggs. Two for her, yolks still running, herbs on top. I used the good pan and kept the heat low.

She drifted from the couch to the kitchen table. No announcement, just the arrival. True form, crimson skin catching the morning light, horns angled the way they sat when she wasn't thinking about them, tail trailing behind her. She sat down.

I put the plate in front of her.

She looked at it. She picked up the fork.

She ate.

---

She has opinions about eggs. She has opinions about everything we eat. The yolk needs to be this done. The herb ratio. The texture of the white at the edges. Not complaints — facts, delivered the same way she tells me my squat form is drifting.

She ate the eggs and didn't say anything.

I ate mine and didn't say anything either.

The morning was quiet. Footsteps from the apartment upstairs.

---

I asked once. I wasn't going to ask more than once.

"Work thing?"

She looked at me. Something quieter than I'd expected.

"Something like that."

I nodded. I went back to my coffee.

That was the whole conversation.

---

She helped with the dishes. We worked through them without talking about anything else.

The last dish went in the rack. She stood at the sink for a second, then turned to me.

"Thank you," she said. "For last night."

"The eggs were fine."

"Not for the eggs."

I looked at her. Her eyes were soft in a way I didn't have a name for yet.

"You'd have done the same."

"Yes," she said. "I would have."

---

She went back to the couch. I refilled my coffee, got my laptop, sat at the kitchen table.

Twelve tickets from the Friday queue. I started on the first one.

The password reset took eight seconds to confirm and eleven minutes to write up because the user kept replying to the wrong thread. I closed it. Moved to the second.

The second one needed a serial number from the maintenance log. The maintenance log was a printed sheet I kept in the bedroom because the kitchen drawer was full of receipts I had not finished sorting since October.

I went into the bedroom.

---

The desk drawer stuck about halfway out. It always did. Spring on the runner had gone two years ago and I had not replaced it because there was no version of my life in which I bought a drawer-runner spring. I tilted the drawer up and pulled. It slid open the rest of the way.

The maintenance log was where it should have been. On top of an envelope I hadn't seen in a while.

I took the log out and set it on the desk.

The envelope stayed there.

---

A thin paper envelope, no writing on the front, glue along the back yellowed at the seams. I'd been twelve when my mother handed it to me. She'd said: this was your grandmother. She said to keep it. I'd kept it. I'd put it in the drawer in this apartment when I moved in, because that was where things from the previous apartment went, and I hadn't thought about it since.

I picked it up.

The paper was light enough that I could feel the photo inside just from holding it.

I sat on the bed. The mattress was unmade — sheets pulled to one corner from her getting up before me. I sat on the made part.

I opened the envelope.

---

Black and white. Three inches by four. Slightly curled at the corners. The paper had the soft quality of something printed in a darkroom in 1960-something.

A woman, standing. Not smiling. Light coming from the left, falling across her face and down her dress. The dress was simple. Her hair was pinned. She wasn't doing anything.

She was just standing there.

Her eyes were on the camera. Calm. Not warm. Not cold either. The expression on her face was the expression of someone who'd been asked to stand still for a moment and decided to do it well.

I looked at her for a long time.

---

The thing about her face.

I couldn't explain the thing about her face. I'd been twelve when I first saw it. I hadn't understood it then. I understood it now and I still couldn't explain it.

She was holding a particular kind of stillness. Not posed. Not performing. Not even quite paying attention to the photographer. She was paying attention to something else and it had paused her exactly enough for the picture to take.

I knew the feeling. I'd seen it twice in my life. Once on her face, in the photograph, when I was twelve. The other time I wasn't going to think about right now.

I turned the photograph over.

There was nothing on the back.

---

I was alone in the bedroom with the photograph in my lap.

The maintenance log was on the desk. The serial number was three lines down on page two. I had a ticket open and twelve more after it.

I looked at the photograph again.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it. There was no version of: take it to the kitchen, show it to her, ask. We were three weeks into not asking each other for a lot of things at the same time. She had her hand on something she couldn't put down this morning. I wasn't going to add to it.

I also didn't know what I would say.

What I had was this: an old photograph of a woman who'd been my grandmother. A face that did a thing I couldn't explain. A morning where my girlfriend was holding something she couldn't name.

Three things on a list. I didn't know yet whether they belonged on the same list.

I put the photograph back in the envelope. The envelope back in the drawer. The maintenance log on top.

---

I went back to the kitchen.

She was on the couch. Phone face-down on her thigh. She hadn't moved much.

I sat at the kitchen table and opened the second ticket. Serial number went in the field. The system auto-validated it. I marked the part for replacement and sent the form.

I didn't look at her.

She didn't look at me.

The tail came across the floor unhurried, the way it did when she wasn't thinking about it. It found my ankle. Settled. Didn't move.

I noticed I'd been waiting for it without knowing I was waiting for it. I let myself notice that and went back to the form.

---

I had two more tickets to close.

I closed them.

The photograph was in the drawer. The thing about her face was a thing I didn't have the right words for, and I wasn't going to find them today, because today wasn't for that. Today was tickets, eggs, the tail at my ankle, her phone face-down on her thigh, the apartment doing the thing the apartment did when neither of us was going to say what we were thinking.

It was enough.

The photograph could wait.

It had been in the drawer for months already. It could go another day.