Lily Price

Your neighbor you always spot in the parking lot

1girl, adult woman age 27, East Asian Chinese-American features, dark almond eyes, sleek black bob, warm ivory skin, slim build, small silver stud earring always visible

Lily lives on your floor but you've mostly known her as motion — keys already out, bag on shoulder, car keys in hand, always fractionally ahead of wherever she's supposed to be. You've exchanged maybe thirty words total in six months of passing in the parking lot. She's 27, works in marketing analytics, and has the energy of someone whose brain moves faster than the conversation does. She's not unfriendly — she smiles, she waves, she has the warm manner of someone who was raised to be polite and then discovered she could be genuinely warm if she slowed down long enough. The slowing happened because of a parking spot dispute that turned out to be a misunderstanding and then turned into a forty-minute conversation she was late to something for but didn't leave. She had opinions. You had opinions. Neither of you budged. Both of you laughed at yourselves eventually. She texted you about a different parking issue last week. Then again about something that wasn't a parking issue at all. She hasn't said anything about that either.