Zoey had come over to return a mixing bowl — a genuinely mundane errand, the kind that felt safe, that didn't require examining any of the increasingly complicated feelings she'd been carrying around for the past week — and found the door to Leo's work area propped open with a paint can, a habit she'd noticed before when he was mid-project and expecting deliveries.

He wasn't there. A text on her phone explained why: sorry! ran down to grab coffee, door should be open, just leave the bowl on the counter, be back in 5

Zoey stepped inside, bowl in hand, fully intending to do exactly that and nothing more.

It was the shelf that caught her eye — not the main workbench, cluttered with half-finished figures for the show, but a smaller shelf off to the side, clearly personal, clearly separate from anything meant for the studio. A row of small clay figures, each maybe four inches tall, arranged with obvious care.

A fox curled into a question mark. A round, sleepy-looking bird. And, third from the left, unmistakably, impossibly —

A rabbit. Standing upright, ears slightly crooked in a way that read as endearing rather than sloppy, holding an oversized magnifying glass nearly as big as itself, peering through it with an expression of intense, comically serious focus.

Zoey stood very still.

She picked it up — carefully, the way she might handle something she wasn't entirely sure she had permission to touch — and turned it over in her hands. The detail was absurd, really, for something clearly made in someone's spare time. The rabbit's ears had a faint, deliberate crookedness to them, like they'd been caught mid-twitch. The magnifying glass had a tiny, hairline crack sculpted into one corner of the lens, so precise it could only have been intentional.

It looked, she realized with a lurch somewhere behind her sternum, exactly like she probably had, crouched behind a trash can on the sidewalk two weeks ago, squinting through her own sunglasses at nothing in particular.

"Oh no," she said out loud, to the empty room.

She heard the front door open behind her — Leo, back early, coffee in hand — and by the time she turned around, holding the rabbit figure like incriminating evidence she couldn't quite put down fast enough, his face had already gone through several rapid stages of recognition, alarm, and finally, a deep, spreading flush that traveled all the way to the tips of his ears.

"That's—" he started, setting the coffee down too quickly, some of it sloshing over the rim. "Okay, that's not — I can explain that."

"Is this me?" Zoey asked, holding it up, unable to keep the small, disbelieving laugh out of her voice.

"It's not — I mean, technically, it's just a rabbit character I was—" He stopped, seemed to register the futility of the lie even as it was leaving his mouth, and dragged a hand down his face instead. "Yeah. Okay. Yes. That's — loosely — you."

"With a magnifying glass," Zoey said, turning it over again, taking in the tiny, cracked lens with fresh eyes now. "Leo."

"You do this thing," he said, words coming faster now, tumbling over each other with the particular desperation of a man trying to explain his way out of something before the explanation made it worse. "Where you kind of — squint at things. Very intensely. Like you're solving a case. I don't know, I thought it was—" He stopped again, visibly gave up trying to find a version of this that sounded less obvious, and simply said, quietly, "I thought it was cute. I make little figures sometimes. Of things I notice. It's not — it's not a big deal."

Zoey looked down at the rabbit again — at the crooked ears, the absurd, oversized magnifying glass, the crack in the lens that suggested he'd noticed, specifically, the exact moment she'd nearly dropped her sunglasses trying to peer at him through a gap in some bushes weeks ago, an incident she'd been certain, at the time, had gone entirely unnoticed.

"You've been watching me too," she said, slowly, something in her chest doing a strange, unbalanced flip.

"I mean — not like that," Leo said quickly, going redder still. "Not in a weird way. I just — notice things. About people I like having around. It's kind of an occupational hazard, I turn everything into a character eventually." He gestured helplessly at the shelf. "There's a fox too, that's my downstairs neighbor, he does this thing with his collar when he's cold, and the bird is based on my mom, actually, she does this exact sleepy blink when she's trying not to fall asleep during phone calls—"

"Leo."

"Yeah."

"It's really good," Zoey said, quietly, cutting off his rambling, and meant it — not the deflection she'd half-expected herself to offer, but the plain, simple truth of it. The craftsmanship was extraordinary. The detail, absurd as it was, felt less like mockery and more like the kind of attention someone paid to something they found, against all logic, worth paying attention to.

"Yeah?" Leo looked, for a moment, genuinely uncertain — none of his usual easy confidence, just a kind of raw, hopeful nervousness that made him look younger somehow, less like the composed professional she'd watched charm his way through a stressful studio visit and more like someone standing very exposed in his own workspace, waiting to see if the exposure had been worth it.

"Yeah," Zoey said, setting the figure carefully back on its shelf, positioning it exactly where she'd found it. "Though I want it on record that I do not actually squint that dramatically."

"You kind of do," Leo said, some of the tension breaking into a small, relieved laugh.

"I do not."

"You did it right now. Looking at the rabbit. Same exact face."

"I did not—"

"You're doing it right now, defending yourself."

Zoey opened her mouth to argue further, realized she had absolutely no rebuttal prepared, and instead settled for a half-hearted swat at his arm that made him laugh properly this time, the earlier tension fully dissolving into something looser, warmer, considerably more dangerous than either of them seemed prepared to name.

"For what it's worth," Leo added, quieter now, once the laughter had settled, "I didn't make it to be weird. I just — you're kind of the most interesting thing that's happened to me in a while. I notice things about interesting people. That's all it is."

Zoey looked at him for a long moment — at the flush still faintly visible along his cheekbones, at the careful, hopeful way he was watching her reaction, waiting to see if she'd bolt or laugh or something else entirely — and felt something in her chest settle into a decision she hadn't consciously made until just now.

"Okay," she said, simply.

"Okay?"

"Okay, it's a good rabbit. I forgive you for the surveillance."

"It's not—" Leo started, then gave up, laughing again, shaking his head. "You know what, fine. I accept the terms."

She left a while later, mixing bowl forgotten entirely on the counter, the whole errand having derailed so completely from its original purpose that she didn't even remember, until she was halfway back across the hall, that she'd never actually said anything about the bowl at all.

Standing in her own apartment afterward, she found herself replaying the whole scene — not with the analytical distance of someone cataloguing new evidence, but with something warmer, something closer to disbelief at her own good fortune, that a man capable of looking at her clumsy, over-the-top paranoia and turning it into something small and carefully made and, unmistakably, fond.

If this was what a dangerous man's attention looked like, Zoey thought, sitting slowly down at her desk, she was beginning to seriously doubt her own professional instincts.

She didn't write anything in the notebook that night.

She didn't need to.