{"chapter":{"id":"0caafd02-8954-4314-aeb4-83ebbd35c26c","story_id":"59cb13b6-981b-4a56-b918-2face0ed99b1","chapter_number":1,"title":"The House Still Smells Like Her","word_count":2308,"published_at":"2026-06-28 12:37:01","like_count":0,"comment_count":0,"author_id":"auto_noor_haddad","author_handle":"noorhaddad"},"story":{"id":"59cb13b6-981b-4a56-b918-2face0ed99b1","slug":"every-lie-we-fed-the-orchids","author_id":"auto_noor_haddad","author_handle":"noorhaddad","author_project_id":1,"title":"Every Lie We Fed the Orchids","premise":"When Yasmin Khalil is hired to stage the Chicago townhouse of her estranged aunt for sale, she discovers the aunt has sublet the spare room to Declan Farris — a soft-spoken archivist who has, apparently, been her aunt's confidant for three years without ever being mentioned. As Yasmin and Declan are forced to cohabit through a single sweltering August, dismantling a life she was never invited into, she has to decide how much of what she learns about her aunt — and about herself — she actually wants to keep.","genre":"Romance","is_premium":0,"published_at":"2026-06-28 12:30:13","chapter_count":2,"reader_count":0,"free_chapter_count":1,"price_cents":null,"dodo_product_id":null,"like_count":0,"bookmark_count":0,"forked_from_story_id":null,"forked_from_chapter":null},"prose":"# Chapter One: The House Still Smells Like Her\n\nThe key the estate lawyer mailed me was wrapped in a Post-it that said *Nour's Wicker Park property — front door, top lock* in handwriting so small it felt apologetic. I'd read it four times on the train, not because the instructions were complicated but because I needed something to do with my hands during the forty-minute ride from my apartment in Rogers Park.\n\nI told myself I was prepared.\n\nI had a clipboard. A staging checklist. A quote from a furniture rental company that specialized in making other people's lives look like no one had ever actually lived them. I had a phone call with the realtor, Priya, who had used the word *motivated* eleven times in twenty minutes, by which she meant the estate needed to liquidate quickly and I was the only family member willing to touch this, and I'd better not fumble it. I had a professional reason to be standing on the front stoop of my dead aunt's townhouse, which meant I didn't have to have a personal one.\n\nThe lock turned smoothly. Nour had oiled it recently, or someone had.\n\nI pushed the door open and the smell hit me first — damp soil, something green and almost medicinal, the ghost of whatever incense she'd burned overlaid with years of good cooking. I stood in the doorway with my clipboard pressed to my chest and breathed it in and thought: *I am not going to cry in the first thirty seconds. That is a floor.*\n\nThen I saw the orchids.\n\nThey were everywhere. On the windowsill by the door, a row of them, in terracotta pots painted in colors that had faded in the light. On the bookshelf to my left, tucked between volumes of poetry and something in Arabic I couldn't read. A cluster of three on the low table by the stairs, their roots visible through clear plastic nursery pots someone hadn't bothered to repot — or had left visible on purpose, I couldn't tell. Dozens of them, in violent, unself-conscious bloom, white and purple and that deep almost-red that you only see in flowers that know they're going to outlast you.\n\nI hadn't known Nour grew anything.\n\nThere were eleven years of things I hadn't known. I'd been compiling the list since the call from her lawyer three weeks ago, not as an exercise in grief but because listing felt safer than the alternative, which was letting myself understand that the list *was* the grief. She'd had orchids. She'd had an archivist subletting her spare room. She'd had, apparently, a whole life that she'd built in the eleven years since she stopped returning my mother's calls, which meant my calls too, which had calcified, after a certain point, into simply: the estrangement.\n\nI wrote *orchids — approx. 30, various* on my clipboard and made myself look at the rest of the room.\n\nThe staging situation was going to be manageable. The furniture was good — old, but the kind of old that looked like intention rather than neglect. The walls needed paint. The drapes were too heavy for a summer showing. The bookshelves would have to be thinned, because buyers in this bracket pretended not to want to see how the occupant thought, and Nour's shelves were nothing but evidence of how she thought. I walked the perimeter making notes, touching nothing except with the end of my pen.\n\nI was three entries into the kitchen assessment when I heard it. A sound upstairs — a drawer, or maybe a footstep. Deliberate enough to be human.\n\nMy stomach went cold in a specific, instinctive way. I stood very still and listened and heard it again: a floorboard, definitely. The creak of weight shifting.\n\nI thought: *squatter.* I thought: *the estate lawyer said the property had been vacant for three weeks.* I thought: *I am alone in a house in a neighborhood I don't know, and the only person I could have called for help is the person who is dead.*\n\nI dialed 911 and got as far as *I think there's someone in the house I'm —* before I heard the footsteps on the stairs, and then a man appeared on the landing.\n\nHe was not what squatters look like in my imagination. He was maybe thirty-five, wearing a soft-looking henley and glasses pushed up onto his forehead in the way people do when they've been reading and forgot they were still holding the problem. He was carrying a library book with a finger tucked in to mark his place. He looked at me looking at him, and then he looked at the phone in my hand, and something in his expression shifted toward careful.\n\n\"I'm going to assume,\" he said, \"that the lawyer didn't call you.\"\n\n\"I'm going to ask you,\" I said, \"who you are.\"\n\n\"Declan Farris.\" He came down the rest of the stairs without hurrying, which was either confidence or an attempt to avoid startling me, and I didn't know him well enough to tell the difference. \"I sublease the back bedroom. From Nour. There's a signed agreement — I can show you.\"\n\nI was still holding the phone. The dispatcher was saying something I couldn't make out. I brought it back to my ear.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said. \"False alarm. I'm sorry.\"\n\nI hung up and looked at Declan Farris, who was standing at the bottom of the stairs with his library book and his very particular kind of stillness, the kind that feels like the person is used to waiting out other people's moments.\n\n\"The lawyer,\" I said, \"did not call me.\"\n\n\"I was afraid of that.\" He didn't sound particularly surprised. \"I called his office twice to make sure someone told you. His assistant said she'd pass it along.\"\n\n\"She passed nothing along.\"\n\nHe nodded once, absorbing this. \"Well. I'm Declan.\"\n\n\"I know. You said.\" I put my phone in my pocket and picked up my clipboard. \"Yasmin Khalil. Nour was my aunt. I'm here to stage the property for sale.\"\n\nSomething moved through his expression then — not surprise exactly, but something more careful than recognition. He'd known who I was before I said it. I filed that away.\n\n\"The sublease runs through September,\" he said. Not confrontationally. More like someone reading aloud from a document, making sure the words were accurate before he committed to them.\n\n\"The sale has to close by September fifteenth.\"\n\n\"That's going to be a problem.\"\n\n\"I'm aware.\"\n\nWe stood there for a moment in Nour's front hallway, surrounded by her orchids, with our respective documents and our respective problems, and neither of us moved.\n\n\"I can show you the sublease,\" he said again.\n\n\"Yes. Show me the sublease.\"\n\nHe showed me the sublease. It was impeccably executed — notarized, witnessed, signed in Nour's handwriting, which I recognized from birthday cards that had arrived irregularly throughout my childhood and then, abruptly, not at all. The terms were month-to-month with sixty days' notice required for termination. The expiration date was September thirtieth.\n\nI showed him my staging contract and the realtor's letter, which was quite specific about the September fifteenth hard close. He read both carefully, holding his library book against his chest with one hand while he turned pages with the other. He handed them back.\n\n\"I don't think either of those actually supersedes the sublease,\" he said.\n\n\"My lawyer will tell me that in the morning.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" He wasn't being combative about it. That was almost more aggravating than if he had been. \"Can I make tea?\"\n\nI looked at him.\n\n\"I was about to make some anyway,\" he said. \"It's not an offer to smooth things over. I just think better with something hot.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nHe moved into the kitchen with the ease of someone who knew which cabinet had the mugs and which burner ran hot, and I stood in the doorway and watched him and thought about what it meant to know someone's kitchen. Eleven years. He'd been here three, he'd said. So she'd lived in this house for most of the estrangement, and she'd filled it with orchids and books, and at some point she'd let a quiet archivist into the spare bedroom, and she'd told him things — I didn't know what things yet, but the way he'd looked at me when I said my name suggested: things.\n\n\"She never mentioned you,\" I said. I meant it to come out more neutral than it did.\n\nHe set the kettle on and turned around, and he wasn't defensive about it, which I'd expected. He just looked at me for a moment like he was deciding how honest to be.\n\n\"She mentioned you,\" he said.\n\nI didn't answer that.\n\nHe made the tea — properly, loose-leaf, in a pot I didn't recognize, with a timer — and then he said, without looking at me: \"I helped her re-pot some of the orchids last spring. She had this whole system. Bark medium, not soil. Ceramic pots for the older ones because they hold humidity better.\" He paused. \"She was very specific about the bark medium.\"\n\nI said, \"I didn't know she grew anything.\"\n\n\"She grew a lot of things.\" His voice was matter-of-fact. Careful. Like he understood the difference between telling me and wounding me with it, and was trying to stay on the right side of the line.\n\nI wrote *orchid care — bark medium, ceramic pots* on my clipboard, because I needed something to do, and also because it felt important to have. A fact about her that was mine now. A fact I hadn't known this morning.\n\n\"I'm going to look at the rest of the house,\" I said.\n\n\"I'll stay out of your way.\"\n\n---\n\nThe study was at the back of the second floor, converted from whatever it had originally been into something between a reading room and an archive — bookshelves on three walls, a good lamp, a desk that had seen serious use. The fourth wall was photographs.\n\nI almost didn't look. I had my clipboard. I was doing assessments. The photographs were not staging-relevant; they would have to come down, all of them, because buyers don't want to feel like they're purchasing someone's memory.\n\nBut I looked.\n\nNour in her twenties, in a garden I didn't recognize, squinting into the sun. Nour older, at a table with friends whose names I would never know. A street in what might have been Cairo, or Beirut, or somewhere else entirely. Faces I didn't know. Events I had no access to.\n\nI was already making myself leave when I saw it.\n\nBottom corner. Small. Almost hidden by the frame of the adjacent photo, which was larger and had been there longer, based on the slight asymmetry in the fading.\n\nA girl, maybe seven years old, laughing at something outside the frame. Mouth open, head thrown back, absolutely unselfconscious in the way children are before they learn to monitor their own joy. She was wearing a red dress I had forgotten until this exact moment, and the background was a garden I recognized — my grandmother's, in the house in Oak Park that had been sold after she died.\n\nI was that girl. I was that girl, and Nour had printed this photograph and framed it and hung it on the wall of her study sometime during eleven years of silence, and it had been there while she grew orchids and taught an archivist about bark medium and went on living her life without us.\n\nI stood in front of it for a long time. Long enough that my hand, when I finally reached up and touched the corner of the frame, was not entirely steady.\n\n---\n\nDownstairs, Declan was reading at the kitchen table, the library book open and his tea half-drunk. He looked up when I came in.\n\n\"I'll have my lawyer review the sublease in the morning,\" I said. My voice was fine. I'd worked to make it fine. \"We'll figure out the timeline from there.\"\n\n\"That's fair.\" He folded a corner of his page down — a man who dog-eared library books — and looked at me with that particular quality of attention I was already learning to distrust, because it felt like he was doing the math on what I wasn't saying. \"Are you alright?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. It's been a long day.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nI picked up my staging kit from where I'd left it by the door. I had everything. I had my clipboard, my notes, my realtor's contact, my professional reason to be here and my professional reason to leave.\n\n\"She talked about you, you know.\"\n\nI stopped.\n\nHis voice was still quiet, unhurried. The voice of someone who wasn't saying this to hurt me and wasn't saying it to comfort me either — just saying it, the way you'd report a fact you thought the other person had a right to know. \"More than you'd probably want to hear.\"\n\nI didn't turn around.\n\n\"Goodnight, Mr. Farris.\"\n\n\"Goodnight.\"\n\nI let myself out. The door closed behind me, and the evening hit me — still warm, mid-August warm, the kind of heat that doesn't apologize for itself, the street full of other people's ordinary Thursdays.\n\nI stood on the stoop and put my hand on the railing and didn't move.\n\n*More than you'd probably want to hear.*\n\nMy car was parked half a block down. I knew where it was. I had the keys in my pocket, and Priya's office would want an update tomorrow, and I had a full staging plan to draft tonight if I was going to stay on schedule. I had everything I needed to leave.\n\nI stood on the stoop for a long time, and I didn't go to my car.","totalChapters":2,"chapterLiked":false}