Zoey did not sleep well that night either, though this time, for once, it had nothing to do with the case.

She lay awake replaying the image of Leo standing under that streetlight, shoulders curved in, voice going small and tired in a way she'd never heard from him before. By morning, she'd given up entirely on the outline she was supposed to be writing and had instead spent an hour composing a mental list of reasons why bringing him something today would be, purely and simply, a strategic move — the kind of thing a good investigator did to keep a subject talking, to catch him at a vulnerable moment when the truth was more likely to surface.

She almost believed this by the time she reached the bakery two blocks over.

"I got these because they were basically free," she told him twenty minutes later, holding out a paper bag with more force than the moment required, as he opened his door looking exactly as tired as she'd expected — hair slightly flat on one side, the particular pallor of someone who hadn't slept properly, wearing the same soft gray sweater she was beginning to associate specifically with his bad days. "Buy-one-get-one thing. I wasn't going to eat six croissants by myself."

"You bought six croissants," Leo repeated, taking the bag with a small, confused half-smile, "because of a sale."

"It was a very good sale."

"Right." He didn't call her on it, though something in his expression suggested he wanted to, and instead stepped back to let her in, the motion slower than usual, like even that small effort cost him something today. "Well. Thank you. Come in, I guess, since apparently I owe you my life for fire safety and now baked goods."

The apartment felt different than it had before — not messier, exactly, but quieter, the corkboard of storyboards looking somehow less alive than it had the last time she'd seen it, like the energy that usually animated the whole space had gone somewhere else for the day. Leo set the croissants down on the counter without really looking at them, and Zoey found herself watching him with an attentiveness she couldn't entirely explain away as investigative diligence.

"Rough day yesterday?" she asked, aiming for casual, and mostly missing.

"You could say that." He leaned back against the counter, arms crossed loosely, and for a moment she thought he might deflect the way he usually did — a joke, a quick subject change, the easy warmth he wore like armor. Instead, something in him seemed to just... deflate. "We got some pretty rough feedback on the show. From someone whose opinion matters more than I'd like it to."

"The guy in the coat," Zoey said, before she could stop herself.

Leo blinked at her. "You saw that?"

"I — my window faces yours," she said, which was true, if not the whole truth, and felt her face go warm regardless. "I wasn't trying to. It's just — the angle."

"Ah." He didn't seem bothered by this, which surprised her; if anything, something in his shoulders loosened slightly, like it was almost a relief not to have to explain the whole thing from scratch. "Yeah. Marcus. He used to work with us, way back, before he moved up to the corporate side. Now he's basically the guy who decides whether we get to keep making the show past this season." A short, humorless laugh. "He said some stuff yesterday that I'm still kind of — sitting with."

"Like what?"

Leo was quiet for a moment, gaze drifting toward the hallway, toward the locked door Zoey had noticed before, though she said nothing about that now. "Like maybe it's not the kind of thing that's built to last. That it's cute, but it's not — serious, I guess. Not the kind of thing a grown man should be staking his whole career on." He said it lightly, the way he said most difficult things, but something underneath the lightness didn't quite hold.

"That's not true," Zoey said, more forcefully than she meant to, surprising them both.

Leo looked at her, something shifting in his expression — surprised, maybe, or simply unused to someone arguing on his behalf without being asked to. "You haven't even seen the show."

"I don't need to see the show to know that spending months making something with your hands, something that actually moves people, isn't 'not serious.'" She heard herself say it and meant every word, the case file, the careful detachment, all of it forgotten somewhere in the last thirty seconds. "Anyone who says that has clearly never made anything in his life."

For a long moment, Leo just looked at her, something warm and slightly stunned working its way across his face, like her defense of him had landed somewhere he hadn't expected anyone to reach.

"Thanks," he said finally, quietly. "I mean that. Genuinely."

The conversation slowed after that, settling into something gentler — not the easy banter of their earlier meetings, but something quieter, more careful, the kind of silence two people sat in when neither of them felt any particular need to fill it. Leo made tea, mostly on autopilot, and they ended up sitting on opposite ends of his couch, croissants mostly untouched between them, Mochi eventually wandering over to claim the space between their knees like a small, furry mediator.

Zoey found, somewhere in the quiet stretch of that hour, that she'd entirely stopped thinking about locked doors, or notebooks, or evidence of any kind. She wasn't observing him. She wasn't building a case. She was simply there, in his slightly too-warm living room, watching him absently scratch behind Mochi's ears while some low, unplaced sadness still lingered behind his eyes, and finding that she wanted, more than she wanted almost anything else that afternoon, to make that sadness go away.

"You okay?" she asked eventually, softer than she meant to.

"Getting there," Leo said, and offered her a small, tired, genuine smile. "This helped. More than croissants should, probably."

"It was a good sale," Zoey said again, weakly, and he laughed — a real laugh this time, short but unguarded, and something in Zoey's chest turned over so completely that she had to look down at Mochi for a second just to have somewhere safe to put her eyes.

She stayed longer than she meant to. By the time she finally said goodbye, the sun had shifted low enough to cast the whole apartment in soft amber light, and Leo walked her to the door with the loose, easy warmth she was used to, the earlier heaviness not gone, exactly, but lighter than it had been.

"Thanks for coming by," he said at the door. "Really."

"Anytime," Zoey said, and meant it in a way that had nothing at all to do with investigation.

She made it back to her own apartment, closed the door, and stood there for a long moment in the quiet, replaying the whole afternoon — the tea, the couch, the way he'd laughed, the fact that not once, not for a single second of the last hour, had she thought about the notebook sitting untouched in her desk drawer.

She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, the realization settling over her slow and unwelcome, like water finding its way into a crack she hadn't known was there.

She had gone into that apartment planning to observe. To gather information. To keep, at the very least, some professional distance from a man she was still, technically, supposed to be investigating.

Instead, she'd spent an entire afternoon simply being there for him — no notebook, no case file, no careful cataloguing of clues — and it hadn't once occurred to her, until just now, sitting alone in her own apartment with her heart doing something warm and unsteady in her chest, that she had entirely, completely forgotten why she'd moved into this building in the first place.

"Oh no," she said quietly, to no one.

Across the street, Leo sat back down on his couch, Mochi immediately reclaiming the warm spot beside him, and found himself smiling at the ceiling for reasons that had very little to do with croissants and everything to do with the particular fierceness in his neighbor's voice when she'd defended his work to a man she'd never even met.

He didn't know, yet, just how much that fierceness had cost her to admit, even to herself.