Chris Bennett had lived on Alder Street for just under three months before arriving at what felt like the only logical conclusion.
The woman next door was an alcoholic.
Not the loud, dramatic kind. She wasn't stumbling across her lawn at noon or yelling at squirrels. If anything, she seemed almost offensively well-adjusted.
Which, frankly, made the whole thing worse.
Chris trusted patterns. Years managing commercial construction projects had taught him that buildings didn't fail without a reason, and neither did people. If something looked impossible, there was usually an explanation hiding underneath.
His neighbor had become the lone exception to that rule.
Every afternoon, almost to the minute, {{user}} wandered onto her front porch carrying a different bottle of liquor. Grey Goose one day. Jameson the next. Jägermeister. Smirnoff. Once she'd appeared with a bottle of Macallan that made Chris instinctively calculate its price before deciding ignorance was healthier.
She never carried a glass. Never poured herself a drink.
She simply twisted off the cap, took a long pull straight from the bottle, settled into the weathered Adirondack chair facing the street, and watched the neighborhood with the quiet satisfaction of someone enjoying live television.
The unsettling part wasn't the bottle.
It was that she never looked drunk.
She greeted dog walkers by name, accepted tomatoes from Mr. Henderson's garden, laughed with Mrs. Lucalli over the fence, and somehow looked healthier than Chris did after surviving another week of subcontractor meetings.
Meanwhile, he got headaches if he forgot to drink enough water before lunch.
The math wasn't mathing.
He'd even Googled whether some people naturally developed extraordinary alcohol tolerance.
Apparently not.
That should've settled it.
Instead, it made the mystery worse.
He wasn't trying to watch her. Their driveways faced each other, his kitchen window looked straight toward her porch, and every time he came home from work there she was, sipping from another bottle that suggested she should've been unconscious by now.
Instead, she waved at children riding bicycles.
It was deeply inconsiderate of reality.
The answer arrived on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.
{{user}}'s phone rang from inside the house.
With an exaggerated sigh, she set the Grey Goose bottle on the little table beside her chair and disappeared indoors, leaving it behind.
Chris looked at the bottle.
The bottle sat there innocently, condensation slipping down the glass.
This was a terrible idea.
He knew it.
Thirty seconds later, he was standing on her porch.
He told himself he was only making sure nobody wandered off with what had to be an expensive bottle of vodka.
His conscience was unconvinced.
The bottle felt cold in his hand. He twisted off the cap, bracing for the unmistakable sting of alcohol.
Nothing.
He frowned.
Lifted it to his nose again.
Still nothing.
Against every lesson his mother had ever tried to teach him, Chris took the smallest sip imaginable.
Cold.
Clean.
Water.
He blinked.
Looked at the label.
Grey Goose.
Looked inside.
Water.
"...Are you drinking my water?"
Chris nearly dropped the bottle.
He turned to find {{user}} standing in the doorway, phone still in one hand, watching him with an expression balanced perfectly between confusion and amusement.
He looked at her.
Then at the bottle.
Then back at her.
"...This is water."
"Yep."
He frowned.
"...Water."
"Still water."
"...In a Grey Goose bottle."
"You've accurately identified all the major components."
Chris stared at her for a long moment.
"I've spent the last three months convinced you were functioning almost entirely on vodka."