The Lease Doesn't Cover Temporal Anomalies

Priya's investigation escalated, as these things inevitably do, from casual suspicion to a genuine spreadsheet — color-coded, cross-referenced, and shown to exactly one person, her best friend Deja, who took one look at it over brunch and said, with the flat conviction of someone who had clearly been waiting for an excuse to say it, "Okay, but what if you're just right?"

"I'm not right. I'm being ridiculous."

"You have a tab labeled 'anachronistic vocabulary incidents' with fourteen entries."

"Fifteen. He called my phone a 'personal communicator' on Sunday."

Deja set down her coffee with the gravity of a woman about to say something life-altering. "Priya. What if you just ask him. Directly. What year he's from."

"He said it's not something he's 'contractually able to answer.'"

"That's not a no!"

It was not, Priya had to admit, a no. She confronted Mr. Higgins that evening, spreadsheet printed and folded with the specific dramatic intensity of a woman who had rehearsed this moment in the shower at least four times, and found him in the building's basement doing something to the boiler that involved a tool she was fairly sure hadn't been invented yet, by anyone, in any timeline she was personally aware of.

"I have a spreadsheet," she announced.

Mr. Higgins looked up, saw the folded paper in her hand, and sighed the specific sigh of a man who had clearly had this exact conversation with a different tenant, in a different building, possibly a different century.

"Ms. Anand," he said finally, setting down the humming tool with visible resignation, "I am going to tell you something, and I need you to understand it changes absolutely nothing about your rent, your lease terms, or your radiator's continued functionality."

"I'm listening."

"The building," he said, "is not entirely fixed to one particular Tuesday. Neither, strictly speaking, am I. It's less 'time travel' and more 'extremely flexible scheduling,' and I would deeply appreciate it if you didn't mention this to the Ellisons in 4B, who are lovely people but would absolutely try to renegotiate their lease based on it."

Priya stared at him for a long moment.

"The rent's still due on the first, though," Mr. Higgins added. "Every version of the first. I checked. Extensively."