Stacey cringed a little as Sam glared at Ethan and hurried to take her shoes and purse from Sam and follow him upstairs. It was times like this that she wished that she could disappear--or better yet, that Ethan had never moved into their building.
"I came up the stairs a few minutes ago," she started, wanting to make sure that Sam knew that she hadn't been inside Ethan's apartment long enough for anything to have happened. "I saw smoke and heard someone calling for help, so I dropped my things and hurried to his apartment and wound up putting out a fire on his stove. I was just telling him to get batteries for his smoke detector when you showed up....I was in there for, like, five minutes, tops."
She didn't know why she felt the need to defend herself because she hadn't been doing anything wrong, but she couldn't help it. She didn't want Sam to be in a bad mood for the rest of the night. As he got out a key and unlocked their door, she leaned her head against the adjacent wall and offered Sam a helpless smile.