“Are you seriously feeling threatened by me wearing a towel?”

“Not at all.”

My voice came out sharper than I intended. I set the mug down harder than necessary, the ceramic clicking against the counter.

“Then what is this really about?” she pressed, tilting her head slightly, as if she was genuinely curious instead of deliberately provoking me.

“It’s about respect,” I said. “It’s about me asking you to stop doing something in my home and you treating it like a suggestion instead of a boundary.”

Kayla let out a short laugh again, that same dismissive sound that had been grinding on my nerves for days.

“You’re overreacting,” she said. “It’s literally just a towel.”

Andrew’s footsteps came down the stairs before I could respond. He paused in the doorway, taking in the scene without interrupting.

For a moment, none of us spoke.

Then Kayla turned toward him like she was about to perform for an audience. “Tell me honestly,” she said. “Do you feel uncomfortable?”

Andrew didn’t answer right away. He just looked at her, then at me, then back at her.

“I’ve already told you,” he said calmly. “This isn’t about me.”

Kayla rolled her eyes. “Of course it is. You’re the one supposedly being affected.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Andrew replied. “I stopped leaving the room because you turned it into a game I didn’t agree to play.”

Her expression shifted slightly. “A game?”

He set his coffee mug down on the counter.

“You called it a test,” he said. “So I treated it like one.”

Silence settled again, heavier this time.

Kayla frowned. “What are you talking about?”

That’s when Andrew pulled his phone out.

“I stopped reacting to see what you were actually trying to prove,” he said. “And once I understood, I started documenting it.”

My stomach tightened.

“Documenting?” I repeated.

Andrew unlocked the screen and turned it slightly toward her.

“You’ve been repeating the same behavior after being asked to stop,” he said evenly. “So I started noting dates, incidents, and your responses. Not because I wanted drama. Because I needed clarity.”

Kayla stared at the phone like it had changed weight in his hand.

“You kept a log?” she said slowly.

“I kept facts,” Andrew corrected. “There’s a difference.”

The air in the kitchen felt different now—less like an argument, more like something had been exposed.

Kayla’s voice dropped. “You were recording me?”

“Observing you,” he said. “In my own home.”

I finally found my voice again. “Andrew…”

He glanced at me, and his tone softened slightly.

“I wasn’t trying to escalate anything,” he said. “I was trying to understand whether this was going to stop on its own—or whether we were going to keep pretending it wasn’t happening.”

Kayla tightened her grip on the mug.

“And what did your little ‘log’ tell you?” she asked.

Andrew held her gaze.

“That you weren’t testing me,” he said. “You were testing whether your boundaries mattered more than ours.”

The words landed hard.

For the first time all week, Kayla didn’t have an immediate response.