She came into the kitchen looking flushed – out of breath, visibly anxious, as if she had been working up the nerve to walk through that door for some time. When they got her to sit down and slow down, the story she told was both completely mundane and quietly alarming. A few days prior, C had been at the reception paying her rent when she got talking to another girl – one we’ll call K. K explained that she had a booking at Chisholm, but the room wasn’t confirmed yet; accommodation was in that frustrating administrative limbo where the paperwork exists but the key does not. C, being C, felt for her. She was a woman, alone, with nowhere to go for the night. So C did what many of us like to think we would do: she brought K back to her room. At first, it was fine. They talked. They bonded. But over the course of the evening, something shifted – not dramatically, not in any single moment, but in the accumulation of small things. K never said thank you. Not for the room, not for the food C retrieved from the kitchen. And when C returned from one of those kitchen trips, she noticed something missing from her belongings – a charger, or something similar, quietly relocated into K’s bag. She let it go. Then she let it go again. Then she realised she wasn’t going to sleep with this person in her room. With quiet, impressive resourcefulness, C had manoeuvred K out of her room and into one of Chisholm’s common study rooms – a comfortable enough space, with sofas and air conditioning, where K could spend the night without the arrangement feeling cruel. Then C had slipped back to her room and gone very, very still. When Residence staff found K in the common room on their nightly safety round, and came to C’s door, C had simply not answered – not out of malice, but out of sheer, exhausted relief at having closed the chapter. Except the chapter wasn’t closed. Because while C had been telling this story – while the three of them sat in the kitchen processing it – K was, at that very moment, asleep in the room of another flatmate: M. M, another resident on the floor, had crossed paths with K after C’s discreet exit and, feeling the same pull of empathy that had gotten C into this situation in the first place, had offered K her room for the night. She meant well. She is that kind of person. The kitchen table went very quiet. “There’s a stranger in M’s room right now,” someone said. Nobody needed to say it again. They knocked on M’s door, gently, and got her to step out for a moment. M confirmed what they feared – yes, K was inside, apparently trying to sleep. And yes, M had started getting that same unsettled feeling C had described. Something just slightly off. A gratitude that wasn’t quite there. 15
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