Barefoot and slow-moving, Holly lingered in the kitchen, cradling a mug that radiated warmth into her palms. The morning was muted, Seattle gray and watercolor-soft, all sound muffled by low clouds and distant drizzle. Light spilled across the floor in thin, diffused stripes. The window over the sink had fogged from the warmth inside, turning the world beyond into gentle shapes and smudged color.

  Her gaze, habitual and tender, drifted up and out across the narrow street, toward the second floor of the building opposite. That window. The one with the Junimo.

  It had become a fixture in her mornings, as much a part of her new routine as the kettle or the feeling of cold tile underfoot. The little green plush, round and strange and utterly out of place, had first caught her eye on move-in day, when the boxes still towered and nothing felt settled. Its presence was odd, almost magical, a splash of color in a city that rarely allowed whimsy. It didn’t belong to the world outside, but there it stayed, steady, cheerful, impossibly constant.

  The curtains on that window never parted fully. Always just a sliver: a gesture of welcome, or maybe caution. Just enough to let in the morning, never enough to see the life behind it. Still, Holly had caught glimpses: a riot of green, maybe a houseplant or three, the soft golden haze of lamplight, the blue shimmer of a monitor deep into the evening. A private little world, glimpsed only in fragments.

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  She’d built a story around the window and its Junimo guardian. Someone lived there who loved soft things and solitude. Someone who brewed tea deliberately and wore cardigans year-round. Someone with shelves bowed under the weight of paperbacks, who played video games for the stories, not the score. Someone who understood the value of quiet. Maybe they had freckles. Their hair would be something that shed a light on the grays of the city. Someone who moved through the world without a hurry, as if time could be persuaded to wait.

  Holly found herself smiling. It was silly, she knew. Constructing a whole person out of a plush and a half-open curtain. But there was comfort in it, the small ritual of looking for that flash of green each day, letting herself believe in the invisible connections of city life.

  She took another sip of coffee and squinted playfully at the window, as if daring the Junimo to blink back.

  “Someday I’ll figure you out,” she murmured, voice low and fond.

  Setting her mug in the sink, Holly padded to the front door, boots in one hand, messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She paused, glancing back for one last look at the fogged window and the little green sentinel perched inside. The sight filled her with a gentle, buoyant hope. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  “Whoever you are,” she said, softer still, “you’ve got the best taste in plushies.”

  With her earbuds in and the door closing behind her, Holly stepped out into the silver morning, the Junimo’s quiet company clinging to her thoughts like the aftertaste of a favorite song.