“Yes. I need you to keep it down. And that better not be my tomato.”

He pops half of it in his mouth. “You know,” he says evenly while chewing, managing to talk with his mouth full and yet still look like the aristocratic product of several generations of wealth, “I’m usually not in the habit of being awake at one twenty-eight in the morning.”

“What a coincidence. Neither was I, before meeting you.”

“But today—that is, yesterday—the entire legal team I run ended up having to work past midnight. Because of some very important missing documents.”

I tense. He cannot mean—

“Don’t worry, the documents were found. Eventually. After my boss tore me and my team a new one. Sounds like something went wrong when they were delivered.” If he could incinerate people with eye lasers, I’d be long cremated. Clearly he knows everything about my little afternoon spite-attack.

“Listen.” I take a deep breath. “It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I’m not your PA. And I don’t see how it justifies you banging all the pots in the house in the middle of the night. I have a long day tomorrow, so—”

“So do I. And as you can imagine, I’ve had a long day today. And I’m hungry. Which means that I’m not going to keep it down. At least not until I’ve had dinner.”

Until about ten seconds ago I was angry in a cool, reasonable way. All of a sudden, I am ready to wrestle the knife out of Liam’s hand and slice his jugular. Just a tiny bit. Just to make him bleed. I won’t, because I don’t think I’d flourish in jail, but I’m also not going to let this go. I’ve tried to have measured responses when he refused to let me install solar panels, when he threw away my broccoli stir-fry because it smelled “swampy,” when he locked me out of the house while I was on my run. But this is the final straw. I’m done. The back of my camel is broken in two. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Liam pours olive oil in a pan, cracks an egg in it, and seems to revert to his default state: forgetting that I exist.

“Liam, whether you like it or not, I. Live. Here. You can’t do whatever the hell you want!”

“Interesting. You seem to be doing exactly that.”

“What are you talking about? You are making an omelet at two in the damn morning, and I am asking you not to.”

“True. Although there is the fact that if you had done your dishes this week I wouldn’t need to wash them so noisily—”

“Oh, shut up. It’s not like you don’t leave your stuff around the house all the time.”

“At least I don’t stack garbage on top of the trash can like it’s a Dadaist sculpture.”

The sound that comes out of my mouth—it almost scares me. “God. You are impossible to have around!”

“That’s just too bad, since I’m here.”