Sera left the phone on the kitchen table.

She meant to make tea. She meant to pour the water, hold the mug, behave like a person who was not waiting for a screen to change.

Instead, she stepped into the hallway.

The flat was dim now. Evening had gathered fully at the windows, and the kitchen light reached only partway across the floor. The rest of the hallway lay in a soft brown shadow.

At the far end, the spare-room door was half-open.

A thin strip of warm light crossed the floor.

Sera stopped.

The door had been like that all day, probably. Maybe all week. No one in the flat paid much attention to it anymore. After her mother died, the room had slowly lost its name. First it was Mum’s room. Then the room with the boxes. Then the spare room.

Then almost nothing.

Sera had passed it for years without going in properly.

But tonight, the half-open door seemed impossible not to see.

A closed door would have been easier. It would have looked private, finished, allowed to stay untouched. A fully open door would have been too direct, too obvious, almost demanding.

Half-open, it did neither.

It waited.

Sera stood in the hallway and listened.

Behind her, the phone remained silent on the table. Ahead of her, the room held its narrow line of light. For a moment, the two silences felt connected — Adrian not replying, the spare room not closing, both of them leaving something unfinished.

She thought of her brother standing in that room years ago, sleeves rolled up, holding a glass of water for their mother. She remembered his face then: tired, careful, older than thirty should have looked.

She also remembered leaving the room first.

Not because she did not care.

Because she had not known how to stay.

Sera moved closer.

The floorboard near the bathroom gave its small familiar creak. The door did not move. Through the gap, she could see the edge of the narrow bed, the folded blanket, the weak glow of the bedside lamp she did not remember switching on.

Her hand rose before she decided to lift it.

Two fingers touched the door.

For a second, she did not push.

The question was not whether she could enter the room.

The question was whether she could stop pretending she was only waiting for Adrian.

A door left ajar can hold the question we have spent years walking past.

Sera pushed it open slowly.

The hinge made a small tired sound.