His name, according to the buzzers, is D. Hartley, and the D stands for Daniel, which I know because he introduced himself in the lift on the third day, very briefly, with the friendly confidence of someone who has recently arrived somewhere and is still at the stage of finding everything charming.He was probably forty. Reasonably tall, the kind of face that settles into pleasantness without any particular effort. He carried his shopping in cloth bags and had a selection of houseplants visible through his open door on moving-in day that suggested a person who had either good intentions toward living things or a good eye for how intentions look.
I gave him a card. The building-management contact, the maintenance numbers, the quiet hours policy, the recycling schedule. Things that everyone needs when they move in and that nobody ever gives you because they assume you already know.
He thanked me genuinely.
I thought: this will be fine.
The tea bag situation began in the second month.
I noticed it first on a Wednesday morning in November — a grey, damp morning when the balcony was not a place I was likely to spend time, which is perhaps why it took me until I went out to bring in a plant that was looking poorly to find it sitting on the concrete beside the pot. A used tea bag. Still slightly wet, the string twisted around itself, the label identifying it as some kind of breakfast blend.
I thought: accident.
I genuinely thought it was an accident.
I picked it up with a piece of tissue, took it down to the bin in the recycling area, and said nothing to anyone. People drop things off balconies. Wind takes things. The man had only been in the building two months, and I was not the woman who runs upstairs over a single tea bag.
The second week of December I hung out two white bath towels on a still morning, went inside to make breakfast, and came back to find one of them had acquired a brown ring the size of a coffee cup, right in the center, with the evidence still sitting in the fabric fold. A tea bag that had landed, saturated, and been there long enough to mean it.I looked at the stain for a moment.
