Zoey Ainsley had built an entire career out of imagining the worst possible thing that could happen to a person, and yet somehow, she had never once imagined this: sitting in her favorite cafe with her phone pressed so hard against her ear that her knuckles had gone white, listening to her editor describe, in excruciating detail, exactly how disappointed the entire publishing house was in her.

"Zoey. Zoey, are you even listening to me?"

"I'm listening." She wasn't, not really. She was watching the barista steam milk in slow motion, the way people do when their brain has quietly checked out of the present moment to go stand in a corner and panic instead. "You said something about disappointment. And deadlines. And possibly my imminent unemployment."

"I said," her editor repeated, with the specific patience of someone counting to ten in her head, "that if you don't have a working outline for me by Friday, we are going to have to seriously discuss whether Whispers in the Dark III is still happening at all."

Zoey closed her eyes. Whispers in the Dark III. The book that was supposed to prove, once and for all, that she wasn't just some girl who wrote passable serial-killer thrillers under a spooky pen name, but a Serious Author of Serious Crime Fiction. The book that currently existed as exactly four sentences and a Word document titled, unhelpfully, new doc final FINAL.docx.

"I have ideas," she said.

"Do you."

"I have several ideas. They're — they're marinating."

"Zoey."

"They're in the incubation phase of the creative process."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, the particular silence of a woman who had heard every possible excuse a writer could invent and was no longer impressed by any of them. "Friday," her editor said finally. "I mean it this time."

The call ended. Zoey set her phone face-down on the table with the reverence of someone placing a dead bird into a small coffin, and then, because her hands needed something to do that wasn't strangling herself with her own scarf, she reached for her coffee cup.

Her hand knocked straight into it.

The cup — a large, extremely hot oat milk latte that she had just paid four dollars and change for — toppled sideways in a slow, tragic arc and emptied itself directly into her lap.

"Oh — oh, no, no, no —"

She shot up out of her chair, grabbing at napkins, dabbing furiously at her jeans while making the kind of pained hissing noise reserved for very specific circumstances involving scalding liquid and delicate anatomy. Around her, the cafe carried on exactly as if a woman were not standing in the middle of it, dying slightly, both emotionally and thermally.

It was in the middle of this small crisis — coffee-soaked, deadline-doomed, on the verge of what she privately classified as a Tuesday-Level Breakdown — that she first noticed him.

He was sitting one table over, half-turned toward the window, phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear, saying something about "the timing on the fall sequence" to whoever was on the other end. He had the kind of face that belonged in a moody indie film — a strong jaw, dark hair that looked like it had opinions about being brushed, and eyes with a slight downward slant that gave him a naturally serious, almost severe expression, like he was perpetually unimpressed with the state of the world.

Zoey noticed him for exactly one reason, and it had nothing to do with his face.

It was his bag.

A black canvas messenger bag, sitting on the chair beside him, identical — genuinely, uncannily identical — to the one currently hanging off the back of her own chair. Same brand. Same worn brass buckle. Same little frayed strap where the fabric had started to give.

She filed this away as a mildly interesting coincidence and went back to blotting coffee out of her jeans with the single-minded fury of a woman who had places to be and a nervous breakdown to schedule for later.

By the time she'd cleaned herself up as best she could, gathered her things, and slung her bag — or so she believed — over her shoulder, the man at the next table was already standing too, still on his call, saying something with a small laugh in his voice about "no, I promise the wolf isn't going to look evil, we're going for misunderstood, not evil" — which struck Zoey, in the two seconds it took to register, as an extremely strange thing to say about a wolf, but she had no bandwidth left to wonder about it.

They reached the door at almost the same moment. He held it for her, out of what she assumed was reflexive politeness, gave her the kind of brief, closed-mouth nod that strangers give each other in doorways, and then he was gone, already halfway down the block, still talking about wolves.

Zoey did not think about him again for the rest of the walk home.

She did not think about him while she let herself into her apartment, or while she peeled off her ruined jeans, or while she stood in front of her closet trying to summon the will to put on real pants instead of collapsing directly into bed like a Victorian woman with a case of the vapors.

She did think about him, however, roughly forty minutes later, when she finally sat down at her desk, opened her bag to retrieve her laptop, and found — instead of her laptop — a small tin of clay-sculpting tools, three sticks of something that looked suspiciously like actual modeling clay, and a black leather notebook that was absolutely, unequivocally, not hers.

Zoey stared into the bag for a long moment.

"No," she said out loud, to no one. "No, absolutely not."

She upended the bag onto her desk like she was performing a controlled demolition. Clay tools clattered out. A half-eaten roll of mints. A single, mysterious guitar pick, even though nothing else about this bag suggested its owner played guitar. And the notebook — thick, black, soft leather, the kind of notebook that looked like it had been chosen specifically because it seemed serious — landed last, spine-up, splayed slightly open from the fall.

Every single deadline-related brain cell Zoey owned went instantly, gleefully quiet, replaced by the one part of her mind that had spent the last six years professionally imagining crime scenes.

She should call him. Obviously. He'd probably given the barista his number, or left a card somewhere, or —

She should absolutely just close the bag and deal with this like a normal, well-adjusted adult.

She picked up the notebook instead.

"It's fine," she told herself, in the specific tone of voice people use right before doing something that is, in fact, not fine at all. "I'm just — returning it. I need to see if there's a name inside. For logistical purposes."

She opened it to the first page.

The handwriting was jagged, urgent, scrawled in a red so dark it looked less like ink and more like something that had dried in a hurry. Zoey's brain, trained by years of writing exactly this kind of thing for a living, read the words twice before it fully processed that they were not, in fact, something she herself had written in a fugue state.

Next target: Little Strawberry. Method: strangulation from behind, at dusk, in the park. Must be dismembered into four pieces and disposed of in the pot.

For one full, suspended second, the room went very quiet, in the way rooms do right before a person's entire nervous system catches up with what their eyes just told it.

Then Zoey made a sound she would later be too embarrassed to describe to anyone, something between a shriek and a hiccup, and dropped the notebook onto her desk like it had bitten her.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Okay okay okay."

Her hands were shaking. She picked the notebook back up — because apparently the same brain that had just short-circuited in terror was also the brain of a woman who had built an entire career analyzing criminal psychology, and that brain, treacherously, was already narrating: first entry establishes victimology, method is disturbingly specific, disposal instructions suggest previous experience —

"No. No, stop that. Stop narrating. This is not a plot point, this is a notebook belonging to a man you sat six feet away from an hour ago."

She stood up so fast her chair rolled backward into the wall. She crossed to her window — the one that looked out over the street below, and, more usefully, into the lit windows of the apartment building directly across from hers — and without really deciding to, she found herself scanning the street like she expected to see the man from the cafe standing there with a shovel.

Instead, she saw him standing in the lit window of the apartment directly across the street, phone to his ear again, one hand raised — and for one horrifying, slow-motion second, Zoey watched him bring that hand up behind his own neck and mime, with startling precision, the exact motion of someone being strangled from behind.

Zoey did not know, could not have known, that what she was witnessing was a stop-motion animator gesturing out the blocking of a scene to his director over the phone — no, higher, get the wolf's paw higher, right, like that — because from where she stood, notebook still trembling in one hand, all she could see was a tall, broad-shouldered stranger, in the very apartment he apparently lived in, directly across from hers, casually rehearsing a strangulation.

The notebook slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a soft, damning thud.

"Oh my god," Zoey breathed. "Oh my god, I have the diary of a serial killer, and he knows, and he lives right there —"

Her phone buzzed on the desk behind her, so suddenly that she actually yelped and spun around like the sound itself might be armed.

It was a text. Unknown number.

hi!! so sorry to bother you — i think we grabbed each other's bags by accident at Blue Fern earlier? black messenger bags, basically twins lol. mine had my sketch stuff in it. no rush at all, just lmk when's good to swap back — Leo

Zoey stared at the screen. Then at the notebook on the floor. Then back at the screen.

Leo.

He had a name now. A name, a number, an apartment directly across the street, and — she looked down again at the page still open on the floor, at the red ink glaring up at her like an accusation — a filing cabinet's worth of very specific plans for someone named Little Strawberry.

She should text back. A normal person would simply text back: no problem, I'll leave it with the doorman, and that would be that, and she would never again have to think about the man with the serious eyebrows and the extremely calm murder confession.

Instead, Zoey sat down slowly on the edge of her bed, notebook clutched to her chest like a shield, and stared across the narrow gap of street between her window and his, where the light was still on, where his shadow moved once, twice, across the blinds, unhurried, entirely unaware that somewhere very close by, a woman who wrote crime novels for a living had just quietly, firmly decided that she was never, ever calling the actual police about this.

She was going to handle it herself.

She didn't know yet that she'd just made the single worst — and, eventually, the single best — decision of her entire life.

Her phone buzzed again. Same number.

also no worries if it's a weird time, i can swing by whenever works for you! i'm actually right across the street, small world huh

Zoey looked up. Across the street, the shadow behind the blinds paused, phone lighting up in its hand.

"Small world," she repeated numbly, "is one way to put it."

She did not sleep well that night. She lay awake running through everything she now knew: a name, a face, an apartment, a notebook full of red ink and worse promises, and the growing, horrible, thrilling certainty that Friday's deadline had just become the least of her problems — because now she had a real mystery to solve, and this time, for once in her overactive, overthinking life, the danger wasn't imaginary.

At least, that was what she told herself.

Across the street, Leo climbed into bed that night thinking about nothing more sinister than whether the wolf's expression in scene fourteen read as sorry enough, and about the odd, nervous, endearing way the woman from the cafe had looked at him through her window just now — like she'd caught him doing something he shouldn't — right before she'd yanked her curtains shut so fast the rod nearly came off the wall.

He smiled slightly into his pillow, entirely unaware that he had just been cast, without audition, as the villain in a story only one of them knew they were starring in.

He made a mental note to bring her something nice when he picked up his sketchbook. New neighbors, he figured, deserved a proper welcome.

Mochi, curled up at the foot of the bed, opened one eye, looked at his human's small, private smile, and went promptly back to sleep, entirely disinterested in the disaster quietly assembling itself one street away.