The apartment is silent at 5:47 AM, which is when I start the ritual.

French press today. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe—the floral one, jasmine notes, the one Noah requested in his single piece of communication six months ago. I measure the beans by weight because precision matters, because some things should be done right even when no one's watching.

Noah lives somewhere nearby. I don't know exactly where. He appeared at my door three weeks after I moved in, 2 AM, holding a ladder. My smoke alarm was dying—that chirp every thirty seconds that makes you want to commit crimes—and I'd been standing on a chair with a broom handle, failing. He fixed it in thirty seconds. Nodded. Left.

The next morning, I left coffee outside my door. A guess. A thank you. The cup was empty when I checked an hour later.

We've been doing this for six months now. I make the coffee. I leave it outside his door—I figured out which one eventually. He takes it. We don't speak.

This morning, the cemetery across the street has a visitor. A figure at one of the headstones—hunched, patient, familiar. Noah. I watch him stand there in the gray light, hands in his pockets, and I understand something I didn't before.

His wife. It has to be. The silence makes sense now—not emptiness but fullness, grief so complete it doesn't need words.

I pour the coffee into his usual cup. Leave it outside his door. Go back to my window.

Great is thy faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see. Every morning I make coffee for a man who never says thank you. Every morning he drinks it. Every morning is a small faithfulness—mine to him, his to her, both of us showing up for something that doesn't require words to be real.

Later, when I check, the cup is empty. And next to it, placed carefully: a small smooth stone from the cemetery. Gray, ordinary, perfect.

I hold it for a long time.