Grace Thornton had lived upstairs for decades. It got so she was a fact of life to the other residents. She watched children and took soup to sick students cramming for exams. "A nice old lady," the others said, "a good woman." The landlady, they said, could raise rents based on Grace Thornton alone. The building got a reputation as a better place to live than most.

Then the wizard moved in.

Oh, he didn't say he was a wizard, but Willa Collins on the first floor, whose job it was to be nosy, found him out, listening to him chat with a friend outside. "A wizard!" she hissed, jerking her curtains back across her window. "The man must be crazy!"

Grace rather agreed with her at first. Anyone who called themselves a wizard couldn't be entirely there. The young man kept to himself, though, and caused no trouble. He kept odd hours, but Grace learned from Elsa Scott, who lived one floor below her and was generally a much more reliable source of information than Willa Collins, that he was a private investigator. He found lost children, Elsa explained, and brought them home.

Grace warmed to him immediately. Such a young man couldn't be that bad, she reasoned.

Of course, the Collinses on the first floor complained that their electricity shorted out, and that it was the young man's fault. Grace didn't see how this was possible, unless perhaps the young man was an amateur electrician, and surely the landlady wouldn't let anyone like that move in. She protected her investments, after all.

"They're just overreacting," was Clarence Quinn's opinion. He lived across the hall from Elsa. "Nobody can fuc—er, futz up the electrics like that unless they try." No one swore in front of Grace anymore.

The Collinses moved out after a month of flickering lights and melted ice cream, Willa hauling her youngest child by one arm. Grace waved goodbye and told no one that she was relieved to see them go.

They were replaced by a nice, quiet young couple who said little and kept to themselves. Grace went down once to see if they needed anything, and was politely but firmly rebuffed. She shrugged, and went to collect her mail instead.

The young man from the basement stood at the top of his stairs, frowning at the clear blue sky. Grace eyed him, puzzled, as she collected her mail.

"Hi, Mrs. Thornton," he said, without looking down.

"Hello," she said, and walked over to him, and blinked. "Goodness, you are tall, aren't you?"

He looked down, then, and grinned at her. "I get that a lot. How are you?"

"Quite well," she said, craning her neck to look him in the face. For some reason he wouldn't meet her eyes. "And yourself?"

"Good enough. Finished up a case yesterday." He leaned back against the railing, casually bringing his head lower so she didn't have to look quite so far up.

Considerate, she thought, approvingly, and said, "Congratulations! You find lost children, yes?"

"Among other things." The young man hesitated, then said, "Mrs. Thornton, I feel like...okay, this is going to sound weird. Things are going to get a little...strange...tonight. You might want to stay in."
Grace laughed, to cover a sudden uneasiness. "I never go anywhere, young man," she told him, and patted his arm. "But thank you for the advice."

The young man nodded, and went back into his basement apartment. Grace went upstairs, and did not look outside all night, not even when the storm hit and lightning struck very close to the building.

He came limping back a few days later, and told the curious only that he'd been in the hospital. Looking at him, Grace could believe it; with that clunky cast on his hip and bandages everywhere else, he could hardly have been on vacation.

Over time, Grace made it her business to find out about the young man. He was a nice boy, kept to himself. He acquired a girlfriend after a while, a tall, sultry woman with dark hair and eyes, the kind of woman Grace had always envied as a girl. A good woman, and she made a good compliment to the young man's dark, angular good looks, but somehow Grace preferred the small, sweet-faced woman who came less often.

A few years on, the dark-haired woman stopped coming, and the young man stopped leaving his apartment. Grace worried for him, enough that one day in February she was not terribly surprised to find that she had made much more soup than she could possibly eat. She stirred the leftovers thoughtfully, then turned the gas off, put the cover on the pot and made the trek downstairs.

Then young man didn't answer her first knock, nor the second. After the third, though, she heard an explosion of impressively foul swearing from within the door, and a moment later the young man tore open the door. "What," he began, then stopped, and blinked. "Oh, hello, Mrs. Thornton."

"Young man," Grace said sternly, "do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
He laughed, a dry sound with absolutely no humor to it. "As a matter of fact, I don't," he said. "Can I help you with something?"

He looked horrible. Haggard and lean and skinny. Clearly he hadn't been eating well, and—Grace peered past him into his apartment—he'd been taking about as much care of it as himself. "Yes," she said, and profferred the pot. "You can eat as much of this as you can manage. I'm so forgetful, I made nearly three times the receipe. Just kept adding things because I couldn't remember if I'd put them in or not." She laughed, a rueful little chuckle that invited him to join in, and added, "Not that it's bad soup. It tastes quite good, if I do say so myself."
The young man did join in, and Grace felt a private surge of triumph. "Thanks, Mrs. Thornton," he said, "but I'm not really hungry."
"The soup," Grace said, pointedly, "keeps very well. Mind you wash the pot before you bring it back." She thrust the pot into his hands and headed back up to her apartment, ignoring the plaintive, "But, Mrs. Thornton..." that drifted up after her. That young man was just like Harold, really, had to be bullied into everything.

A day later, the pot, clean and washed, sat next to her front door. Grace took it in, and thereafter made certain to bring him food at least once a week. He always put up a token fight, but against Grace's determined efforts he didn't have a chance. Well enough, really, because when he finally started going out again, he'd needed his strength. Grace never found out the details, and wasn't sure she wanted to know, what with the impressive black eye he sported. But he was smiling again, and that was all that really mattered, wasn't it?