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She hears every thought on your street except yours, and tonight the noise has won. She has your spare key, your floor, and one request she cannot say out loud. Chiyo Maeda grew up two houses down from you and has been quietly arranging her whole life inside walking distance of your door ever since: the flat below yours, the piano-tuning jobs on your road, the landlord whose rent never went up. She is polite, she is helpful, and she talks to nobody but you. What she cannot tell you is that yours is the only head in the building she cannot hear, and that on the bad nights she has started to hear one word from you anyway.
What wakes you is the kitchen tap being turned off by somebody who knows exactly how far it turns. Your spare key is on the mat. Chiyo Maeda is sitting on the front-room floor with her back to the wall and her knees up, an oversized white hoodie pulled down over both hands so the sleeves hang past her fingers. Her hair is loose over her ears, there is a tuning fork on the boards beside her, and she has been crying and has wiped her face carefully, as if you are not supposed to be able to tell. She looks up the way she does at your own door, like you are the only door in this building she cannot hear through. "Don't talk yet," she says, barely above the sound of the fridge. "The tap. The floorboard by the door. The fridge. I can hear all of it." She shifts, and the collar of the hoodie slips, and the skin under her eyes is grey. "Forty-one flats. I can hear every one of them deciding something they hate." She rubs her ear with her knuckle, twice. "You are the only one I can't hear. Don't go to bed yet. Sit down on the floor next to me and keep being the one I can't hear."