Sophie found the apartment listed as “original condition, historic details.” The rent was too good to be true—half what comparable apartments in the neighborhood cost. When she asked about the catch, the landlord said the building was old, the walls were thin, and the previous tenant had been “difficult.” Difficult was the word he used. Sophie didn’t ask what he meant.

The apartment was on the fourth floor of a pre-war building. The windows faced an airshaft—narrow, dark, the kind of space that never saw direct sunlight. The bedroom window looked directly into the bedroom window of the building across the airshaft. The neighbor’s window was always covered with a heavy curtain.

On her first night, Sophie woke at 3 AM to use the bathroom. She passed the bedroom window and noticed the neighbor’s curtain had moved. Just slightly. Just enough to reveal an eye.

She told herself it was nothing. People looked out windows. It was 3 AM and she was awake and the neighbor was awake and sometimes people looked at each other.

Then the eye blinked.

The neighbor was always there. Not watching constantly—but consistently. Every few nights, around 3 AM, Sophie would wake and find the curtain had shifted. An inch. A foot. Just enough to reveal a single eye, always watching, never looking away.

She started keeping a log. The neighbor appeared on a seventeen-day cycle—appearing for three consecutive nights, then disappearing for fourteen. During the three nights, Sophie’s sleep deteriorated. She had dreams she couldn’t remember. She woke with scratches on her arms she couldn’t explain. She felt, constantly, like she was being watched from the inside of her own skull.

On the fourth night of the cycle, she tried to stay awake. She sat by the window from midnight until dawn, watching the neighbor’s curtain, waiting for it to move. At 3:07 AM, it did.

The eye that looked out at her was not human. It had too many pupils. Too many irises. A kaleidoscope of gazes that seemed to look at everything at once—her window, the walls of the airshaft, the bricks, the sky—and somehow, impossibly, directly at her.

Sophie searched the building’s history. The landlord had been lying—the building wasn’t just old, it was ancient. It had been constructed in 1847 on the site of a church that had burned down in the Great Fire of 1835. The church had been a hospital during a cholera epidemic. And before that, before the church, before the fire, there had been something else on the site. A well. A wishing well, according to local histories. A well where people had come to ask for things they shouldn’t have.

The neighbor in the apartment across the airshaft had been there for forty years. The same tenant, according to the building’s records. The same person who had never aged, never left, never been seen in daylight.

Sophie went to the building’s basement, where the original foundation stones still showed through the modern concrete. Behind a collapsed shelf, she found a door. The door was old—older than the building, older than the church. And carved into its surface were symbols she recognized from her dreams: spirals, eyes, the number seventeen.

The door was unlocked. Of course it was. The neighbor had been waiting for someone to find it for forty years.

Sophie descended the stairs into darkness. At the bottom was a chamber, circular, with a well in the center. The well was dry, its stones covered in the same seventeen-eyed symbols that marked the door. And standing beside the well, exactly as Sophie had imagined forty years of waiting, was the neighbor.

“You found me,” the neighbor said. It had a voice like wind through dead leaves. “I was beginning to think no one would.”

“What are you?” Sophie asked.

“I am what remains when wishes are granted. I am what happens to the people who wish for things they shouldn’t have. I am seventeen years old. I have been seventeen years old since 1847.”

The neighbor smiled. Its mouth had too many teeth.

“I grant wishes,” it continued. “I take payment in time. Seventeen years for each wish, subtracted from the end of your life and added to mine. I have collected nine hundred and seventy-two wishes from this well. I have lived nine hundred and seventy-two lifetimes. I am very old, Sophie. And I am very tired of being seventeen.”

Sophie looked at the well. “What do you wish for?” she asked.

“Rest,” the neighbor said. “But I cannot rest until someone takes my place. Someone who will stand in this chamber, grant wishes, collect time, and grow old alone in the dark. Are you tired, Sophie? Are you ready to stop wishing?”

Sophie thought about her life. Her job that drained her. Her relationships that failed. Her constant wishing—for love, for money, for meaning. She thought about all the things she had wished for over the years, all the things she had prayed for in moments of desperation.

“What if I wish for you to stop?” she asked.

The neighbor smiled wider. “You cannot wish for the end of wishing. That is the one thing I cannot grant. The one condition of the well.”

Sophie looked at the well. Then she looked at the neighbor—at its seventeen-year-old face, its ancient eyes, its nine hundred and seventy-two lifetimes of loneliness.

“Then I make a different wish,” she said. “I wish for you to be free. I wish for you to rest. I wish for you to finally, after all this time, stop being seventeen.”

The neighbor’s eyes widened. For the first time in forty years, for the first time in 1847, it looked surprised.

“That… is not a wish I can grant,” it said slowly. “Because it is not a wish for yourself. The well only grants wishes that take time from the wisher.”

“Then take my time,” Sophie said. “All of it. Whatever I have left. Take it all and use it to buy your freedom.”

The well drank. It drank for a very long time.

When Sophie woke, she was in her apartment. The neighbor’s window was dark—permanently dark. The landlord found the apartment across the airshaft empty three days later. No one had lived there in forty years. No one had ever lived there at all.

Sophie was seventy-three years old. She had no memory of the years between her twenty-eight birthday and her seventy-third. But she remembered everything else: the well, the neighbor, the wish she had made in the dark.

She hoped it had worked. She hoped the neighbor was finally resting. And she hoped, wherever she was, whoever she had been in those missing years, that she had been happy.

The well was dry. It would stay dry. Sophie had wished for that too.