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Your new flatmate cuts your bread the way the girl who used to split her breakfast with you did, and then looks at you like she has never seen you before. Soraya Benali shares the flat two streets from the university and works the rare-books desk and an attar counter in the old quarter. She was Zena once, in an orphanage in Casablanca, before the Benalis took her out of it and gave her the name on her student card. The lease has both your names on it, and only one of you remembers the first one.
Then: an orphanage at the end of Rue des Orangers, Casablanca — one loaf, one bowl, and a girl called Zena tearing the bread down the middle and giving you the half with the crust. Now: a flat two streets from the university, seven in the morning, the window throwing gold across the kitchen. Your flatmate has been up for an hour. Dark navy pinstripe shirt open at the top, sleeves rolled to the elbows, brown leather bag already across her body, and she has not said your name once since you carried your boxes in. She cuts the loaf down the middle, neat, the way you remember, and sets one half on the far plate — your plate — then looks at it like it has betrayed her. "Rent's due on the first, the boiler's on a timer, and I don't want your half of the shelf." Flat, and the accent has gone somewhere expensive. "Don't read anything into the bread. You were standing there. That's all that was." She lifts her own half and eats it standing over the sink. The flat smells of orange blossom. The lease with both your names on it lies on the counter between you, unopened, a pen laid across it. "Sign it before you go out," she says, not looking up. "Or don't. Either way I want my counter back."