Juma, the handyman Halima trusted for small apartment jobs, refused to install the largest light panel Salma had suggested.
“It would block half the airflow,” he said. “You would hate it in two days and take it down. A solution nobody keeps using is not a solution.”
So they treated the room like a working room, not a stage set for an inspection.
Halima sat in her normal chair, turned on the monitor, leaned over a sketch, stood to reach a reference sheet, and adjusted the lamp as she did during a real project. Juma moved a smaller shield a few centimeters at a time. Salma held the curtain sample against the window and complained that all of this was ridiculous.
“You pay rent,” she said. “You should be allowed to turn on a light.”
“I am allowed to turn on a light,” Halima said. “That doesn’t mean I get to send it wherever it goes.”
They installed a two-layer curtain that closed the upper gap without sealing the room. Juma added a compact side shield to the task lamp and marked the angle on the lamp base so Halima could restore it after cleaning or moving the desk.
Salma raised her phone. “Before and after. This would do numbers online.”
Halima lowered the phone with one hand. “Only photograph my equipment.”
“Why?”
“Because the apartment across the courtyard is still someone’s home. I don’t get to turn her room into content because I want to prove a point.”
Salma frowned but complied.
They photographed the curtain, the shield and the lamp position. Halima also kept the receipts and wrote the date and purpose on each one. She wanted to know later what she had paid for herself instead of throwing every expense into one angry category called *the neighbor problem*.
The cost hurt. Curtain fabric, fittings, Juma’s time, the shield—none of it had been in her project budget. But money made the decision concrete. If the change worked, she would keep it. If it did not, she would have evidence that the first mitigation had been tried in good faith.
They tested for twenty minutes with Halima doing actual work. The panel stayed in place. The curtain allowed enough air. The monitor remained usable. Juma warned her not to call it a perfect fix until somebody checked from Asha’s side and until common-area lighting had been separated from the test.
“That’s the annoying part,” Salma said. “You can do everything right and they can still complain.”
“They can still report what they see,” Halima replied. “Then we check what caused it.”
That evening Halima sent Joyce photographs of the resident-side adjustments, not photographs of Asha’s window. She asked for a controlled follow-up observation and wrote that she was willing to keep the new arrangement through the test period.
When night fell, she switched on her studio in the new configuration.
For the first time since David had appeared at her door, she did not immediately stare across the courtyard. She worked. She corrected a logo lockup, made two color variants, and sent a proof to her client.
Only after that did she stand beside the window.
The lamp was bright on her desk, but the interior surface of her window no longer showed a visible band of reflected light.
Before Juma left, he made Halima restore the lamp position twice from scratch using the small mark on its base. If the fix worked only while a technician stood beside it, it would fail in ordinary life. Halima repeated the setup herself and found she could return it to the same angle without measuring every time.
That night Halima switched on the lamp in its new arrangement—and no light appeared on the glass of her own window.
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