The power went out at 11:17 p.m. on a Tuesday.

One moment Elowen's apartment was its usual warm domestic self — lamp light, tablet glow, Sunny asleep against the radiator — and the next it was dark in the complete way that cities very rarely managed, all the ambient light of screens and streetlamps gone simultaneously, leaving only the residual dark and the distant blue of emergency lighting in the hallway visible beneath her door.

Sunny lifted his head.

"Yeah," Elowen said.

She found her phone by its own screen glow, confirming that the building's power was out, that several neighbors were apparently sharing this opinion in the group chat she'd been added to without asking, and that the restoration estimate was two to four hours.

She sat in the dark for a moment.

Then she called Lucien.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Power's out," she said.

"I know." His voice was immediate and steady, which was to say it sounded exactly like it always sounded, which was calm in a way that probably helped in quarterly reviews and also, it turned out, power outages. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Just — suddenly very aware of how much my apartment relies on electricity for its personality."

"Do you have candles?"

"I have one candle. It smells like bergamot and false promises."

A faint sound that might have been a laugh, brief and private.

"I have several," he said.

"Are you offering?"

"I'm asking if you'd like to come over. Or I can bring them."

She looked at the darkness around her. At Sunny, who had settled his head back down with the equanimity of a creature whose internal lighting was entirely independent of the grid.

"I'll come over," she said. "Give me two minutes."

She went over in socked feet with Sunny on the leash out of habit rather than necessity, knocking at 402 while holding her phone as a flashlight like a visitor from the nineteenth century.

Lucien opened the door.

He had lit three candles in the living room, placed with the specific intentionality of a man who approached aesthetic questions the way other people approached engineering problems. The effect was warm and frankly unfair, all amber and shadow in the high-ceilinged space, and Lucien in the middle of it, sleeves rolled, something careful in his expression.

"Hello," he said.

"Your apartment looks like it was designed for power outages specifically," she said.

"Designed for low light, actually. Come in."

She came in. Sunny went immediately to investigate the candles, was redirected, and settled on the rug with the moral authority of a dog who had decided this was his space.

They ended up on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, because the candles were on the table and the floor was closer to them, and neither of them suggested sitting on the furniture. Elowen wasn't sure how that happened. It felt like something that had been decided by the room rather than by either of them.

The call was still running on her phone, which she noticed and didn't end.

"We could hang up," she said.

"We could," he agreed, making no move toward his phone.

She set hers down on the rug between them.

The city outside was doing something interesting: without interior lights to compete, the ambient glow of the streetlamps and passing cars created a visual texture she'd never seen from her own street. Deep purples and moving gold along the ceiling, the kind of light that existed between states.

"Tell me something about your childhood," she said.

"We covered that."

"We covered the large structural things. I want something small."

A pause.

"What kind of small?"

"A moment. Not a significant one. Just something you remember."

He looked at the nearest candle for a moment.

"There was a kitchen garden at my grandmother's estate," he said. "Before she died, before I was seven. She grew herbs along a south-facing wall. I remember the smell — rosemary and thyme and the specific warmth of stone in the afternoon." He paused. "She would let me crush a leaf between my fingers. I don't know why I remember that specifically."

Elowen rested her chin on her knees.

"Because it was someone letting you participate," she said softly.

He looked at her.

"Yes," he said, after a moment.

"I have one like that. My grandmother made jam every August. She always gave me the job of putting the lids on — which is the least skilled part of the operation, but she made it feel essential." Elowen smiled faintly. "I was maybe eight. I thought I was genuinely responsible for the jam's success."

"Were you?"

"Categorically not. The jam was fine with or without my contribution." She laughed. "But I didn't know that then. She let me believe the thing mattered."

"That's a kindness," Lucien said.

"Yes. She was full of them. Small ones, especially."

A comfortable silence settled.

Outside, rain found its way back, soft against the windows, adding its own quiet layer to the dark room.

"You talk about her often," he said.

"She was the safest person I knew." She paused. "That sounds like I'm making her into a saint. She wasn't. She had opinions about everything and a very strict position on breakfast foods. But she made rooms feel like you were allowed to be exactly yourself inside them." She looked at the candle. "I keep trying to build that in my apartment. I think I'm getting closer."

Lucien was quiet.

She was about to change the subject when he said, "You build it wherever you go."

She looked at him.

His eyes were on her, serious and direct in the candlelight.

"You make rooms feel like that," he said. "Yours. Mine. Wherever you are."

She felt the words settle somewhere tender and complicated.

"Lucien—"

"I'm not saying it for any reason beyond that it's true," he said. "You can let it be true without it requiring a response."

She looked at him for a long time in the amber light, and he looked back, and the candles did their quiet patient work, and neither of them said anything more for a while.

The power came back at 1:40 a.m.

All the lights blazed on simultaneously, startling Sunny awake and making them both flinch.

Then Elowen laughed — the surprised, bright kind — and looked at Lucien, and he was almost smiling.

"The bergamot candle would have been worse," he said.

"Considerably worse," she agreed.

She went home at two with Sunny trotting beside her and the warmth of candlelight still lingering in some interior room she couldn't quite identify.