Ashly stood at her own front door with the key in the lock, not turning it.
Inside was quiet — the kind of quiet that doesn't quite sound like a place where people live. She knew her mother was probably in there — at this hour she usually was — but she didn't want to go in.
"Sometimes I don't really want to go home," she'd said to Elena that morning. Elena asked why. She said it just felt empty. That was true, but not all of it.
She turned the key. The door opened.
The living room curtains were drawn, the light inside low. The air smelled faintly of cleaning product — her mother's traces from the early morning shift. Her mother was a cleaner who worked through the night, finishing at six in the morning. By now she'd be deep in sleep. Her father worked as a security guard on the night shift and wouldn't be back until eleven.
Which meant the next seven hours belonged to Ashly alone.
She set her bag on the couch, looked at the clock on the wall. She went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator. Some leftovers from yesterday morning, covered in cling film. She put them in the microwave.
While she waited, she leaned against the counter and looked out the window. In the block across the way, lights were on behind different windows — people cooking, people watching television, people arguing. Those sounds came through muffled and blunted by the glass, as if they were arriving from somewhere else entirely.
The microwave chimed. She took the plate to the table and ate alone.
This wasn't unusual. Most days were like this. In the morning when she left, her mother was still asleep. In the evening when she came back, her mother had already gone to work. Weekends, her mother slept to catch up, her father rested, and the three of them lived in the same flat like three parallel lines — sharing a roof, almost never sharing a moment.
Ashly knew her parents loved her. Her mother bought a cake on her birthday. Her father took her out to eat when she did well on an exam. But the love came through something — like looking at something through frosted glass. The shape visible, the detail not.
Sometimes she thought: if they didn't work nights, would things be different. If they could be there when she got home from school. If they could eat dinner together, and she could tell them what had happened that day.
But she stopped the thought before it got anywhere. There was no use in it. This was life, not a story.
She washed up after eating and went to her room.
The room was quiet enough to hear her own breathing. She turned on the lamp and started on her homework. Outside the window the sky darkened gradually, the streetlights came on, cars passed below occasionally.
She picked up her phone and sent Elena a message: see you tomorrow.
Elena replied quickly: okay.
Ashly looked at that single word for a moment and smiled slightly. Elena was a strange person — always slightly somewhere else, her mind on something other than where she was. But Ashly liked her, because Elena never asked "what's wrong" and never pushed her to say things she didn't want to say. She was just there, quietly, and that was enough.
She lay down on her bed and looked at the ceiling.
She didn't know what was going on with Elena lately. Something was different — she couldn't name exactly what, just something in the way she looked at people, or how often she seemed to be somewhere else. Ashly wanted to ask, but didn't know how to start. She kept her own things well hidden — she couldn't exactly ask someone else to open theirs.
Maybe, she thought, everyone has things they keep to themselves. Elena had hers. She had hers. They just went about keeping them in different ways.
She closed her eyes and let herself drift toward sleep.
Tomorrow there was school. Tomorrow she would smile and say "not bad" when someone asked how things were.
That was just how it was.