She woke to the sound of water and a room gone the color of weak tea, morning coming in sideways through blinds he hadn't bothered to close all the way.
For a minute she just lay there, cataloguing exits. Her dress was still on the chair where she'd stepped out of it. Her shoes were somewhere near the door, unpaired, the way shoes end up when nobody was thinking about where they'd need them later.
She had it half-planned, the leaving. Find the dress, find one shoe and then the other, be gone before the water shut off and there was a version of this morning that required conversation.
Then she saw the towel, folded in thirds on the radiator, on her side of the bed, white against the dull iron, set there with more care than a towel needed. Not tossed. Not grabbed off a hook on the way past. Folded, and placed, while she was still asleep and couldn't have asked for it.
She sat up and looked at it longer than a towel warranted. It meant he'd stood in this room while she slept and thought about her being cold. It meant he'd known she'd want it there before she did, and had done the small, unglamorous work of making sure.
The water kept running. She could hear him under it, unhurried, a man in no rush to find out whether she'd still be there.
She put her plan down the way you put down something you'd picked up out of habit rather than need.
Bare feet on the cold floor, sheet left behind on the bed, she crossed the hall instead of the room with her dress in it, and stood in the doorway where the steam had started to reach her, watching the shape of him through the glass.
He turned his head before she said anything, like he'd been listening for exactly this. "I wasn't sure you'd still be here," he said.
"I wasn't either," she said, and stepped in out of the cold.