The morning Gloria noticed the leak under the kitchen sink was also the morning the upstairs bathroom faucet stopped its two-year drip.
She'd never fixed it. She'd thought about fixing it — had looked up videos, priced the parts, mentioned it to her sister who knew a plumber. But the drip had continued through all of that thinking, marking the hours in the upstairs bathroom while Gloria was downstairs, or at work, or asleep.
The plumber her sister sent came on a Thursday. He fixed the kitchen leak in forty minutes, then asked if there was anything else. Gloria led him upstairs out of habit — she'd been leading people to that faucet for two years. But the basin was dry.
"Looks fine to me," the plumber said.
She turned the handle. Water came. She turned it off. Nothing.
"It used to drip," she said.
He shrugged. "Washers sometimes reseat themselves. Mineral deposit breaks loose, lands in the right spot. Happens."
After he left, Gloria stood in the upstairs bathroom for a long time. The faucet gleamed. The basin was dry. She could hear the house settling around her — the refrigerator cycling on downstairs, a branch against the window at the end of the hall.
For two years, every time she'd thought about the drip, she'd been somewhere else. Not in the bathroom, not watching it, not there when the mineral deposit broke loose or the washer found its seat or whatever silent event had resolved the problem she'd been planning to solve. The fix had happened in exactly the space her attention wasn't occupying.
She couldn't even say when. Last week? Last month? She'd stopped hearing it at some point, which meant it had stopped at some point, which meant there'd been a specific moment — a last drip, followed by silence — and she'd missed it entirely. She'd been doing something else. She was always doing something else.
The kitchen sink had needed her. The upstairs faucet had needed her absence. Both problems resolved on the same Thursday, but only one of them had waited for her.