Zoey did not sleep so much as she lay very still in the dark, replaying the notebook's opening page against the inside of her eyelids like a horror movie trailer stuck on loop. By four in the morning she had catalogued every possible interpretation of the words strangulation, dusk, and pot, arranged in ascending order of how likely they were to end with her own name in a headline.
By six, she had made herself a cup of tea she never drank, sat down at her desk, and stared at the notebook the way one stares at an unexploded firework.
By seven, she had her phone in her hand, thumb hovering over the keypad, three numbers already typed.
9-1-1.
She stared at it for a long moment.
Then she imagined, with the horrible clarity of a woman who wrote dialogue for a living, exactly how that call would go.
"911, what's your emergency?" "Um, hi, yes, so — I think my new neighbor might be a serial killer? No, I haven't met him. Well, I met him once, briefly, at a cafe. No, he hasn't threatened me. It's just — I accidentally took his bag, and there was a notebook in it, and it said some things about a — a Little Strawberry, and dismemberment, and — no, I don't know who Little Strawberry is. No, I don't have his last name. I have his first name and the fact that he lives directly across the street from me, which, by the way, I only know because I was watching him through my window last night, which, in retrospect, might not be the detail I lead with —"
Zoey deleted the numbers one at a time.
"Okay," she said out loud, to the empty apartment, in the voice she used when she was building a case — not a legal case, just the internal, private kind she constructed to convince herself of things. "Okay. Think about this rationally."
She picked up the notebook again, this time with the clinical detachment of someone examining Exhibit A rather than someone actively panicking. She'd built a career, however wobbly it currently felt, on understanding criminal psychology — or at least on writing convincingly enough about it that no one had asked for a refund yet. And criminal psychology, she reminded herself, did not typically involve calling the police over four ambiguous sentences and zero corroborating evidence.
"If I go to the police with this," she told the notebook, as though it might argue back, "one of two things happens. Either they take one look at this and think I'm the unhinged one — which, fair — or they actually investigate, find out it's nothing, and I've just accused an innocent man of premeditated murder based on a diary I stole out of his bag."
Stole felt like a strong word. She revised it, silently, to acquired under circumstances beyond her control.
"Or," she continued, warming to her own logic now, "I do this properly. I observe. I gather information. I determine whether there's an actual threat before I ruin a man's life over what might just be —" she flipped back to the page, squinting at it in the daylight, "— an extremely violent to-do list."
She did not examine, at that particular moment, the fact that a normal person's next step after I've found a possibly incriminating document was not, generally, I will personally conduct a covert investigation, and not, say, I will hand this over to trained professionals whose entire job is investigating things. Zoey had spent six years being the smartest, most paranoid person in any room she'd ever written into existence, and some small, treacherous part of her brain had already decided that this was, essentially, the plot of her next book, except real, and she was the protagonist.
This was, she would later admit, not her finest piece of reasoning.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. The same unknown number as last night — already saved, she noticed with a faint flush of something she refused to name, under the contact name Leo (?!), complete with the punctuation she'd added at eleven p.m. in a fit of hysteria.
morning! no pressure at all, just wanted to check — is there a good time today to swap bags back? i have a bit of a deadline crunch so kind of need my sketchbook lol, but genuinely whenever works for you
Zoey read it three times.
Deadline crunch. Interesting. Suspects under deadline pressure, she noted, in the small back corner of her mind that never fully stopped narrating, often made mistakes. Got sloppy. Revealed things.
This, she decided, was her opening.
She could simply leave the bag with the building's doorman, as any reasonable, self-preserving human being would do, and never see this man again except through the safety of a fourth-floor window and several layers of curtain.
Or she could use this exchange — this perfectly ordinary, perfectly mundane bag swap — to look him directly in the eye and determine, once and for all, whether the man from the cafe was actually capable of the things scrawled in red ink on his notebook page.
It was, she told herself, the responsible thing to do. The safe thing, even. Know your enemy. Gather intelligence before you act. Any half-decent thriller writer knew that the amateur who ran straight to the authorities with insufficient evidence just ended up looking hysterical in chapter three, while the protagonist who did her own digging was the one who cracked the case.
She was, it did not occur to her to notice, essentially arguing herself into spending more time with the man she'd spent the entire night convinced was a murderer, using logic that would not have survived thirty seconds of scrutiny from anyone who wasn't currently operating on four hours of anxious, sleepless conviction.
She typed back: hey! no worries, totally understand the deadline thing. i'm home most of the morning if you want to swap in the lobby or something — whatever's easiest
She hit send before she could think too hard about the phrase whatever's easiest, which felt, in retrospect, slightly too friendly for a woman conducting a covert investigation into a possible murderer.
The reply came fast.
perfect, thank you!! i'll head down in like 20 min if that works? i'm across the street so it's like a 90 second walk lol
Zoey looked at the notebook one more time before she carefully — reverently, almost — closed it and slid it into her tote bag alongside his messenger bag, tools and all. She would return it exactly as she'd found it. Untouched. Unread. As far as anyone would ever know.
She spent the next twenty minutes doing something she would also, later, be too embarrassed to admit to anyone: she rehearsed.
Not what to say, exactly — she'd figured out a script for that easily enough, something breezy about coffee and mixed-up bags. What she rehearsed was her face. The specific arrangement of features a person makes when they are absolutely, definitely not sizing someone up for signs of homicidal tendencies. She practiced it in the hallway mirror three separate times, adjusting the angle of a friendly, unbothered smile until it looked less like a hostage negotiator and more like a normal woman who occasionally left her apartment.
By the time she made it down to the lobby, tote bag slung over one shoulder like a shield, she had almost convinced herself she looked completely at ease.
Leo was already there.
He was leaning against the mailboxes in a soft gray sweater, hair slightly damp like he'd just gotten out of the shower, and when he saw her, his whole face did something Zoey was wholly unprepared for — it lit up, unguarded and easy, the kind of smile that had absolutely no business belonging to someone with a red-ink notebook full of dismemberment instructions.
"Hey! Sorry, again, for the whole—" He gestured vaguely between them, a small, self-deprecating laugh. "I promise I'm not usually this disorganized. In my defense, our bags are genuinely identical, it's honestly kind of funny—"
"Totally fine," Zoey said, in a voice that came out approximately one octave higher than her regular speaking voice. She held out the messenger bag like it might detonate. "Here. Everything should be — I didn't really look through it or anything." A lie. A significant, structurally important lie.
"Oh, no worries even if you did, it's just clay tools and my sketchbook, nothing exciting." He took the bag, and in the same motion, held out hers — her actual bag, laptop and all, looking small and slightly apologetic in his hands. "Thank you so much for this. I would've been in real trouble without my sketchbook, I've got notes on, like, six weeks of storyboards in there."
Storyboards. Zoey filed this away. Consistent with the cover story of an animator. Or, she reminded herself, consistent with an elaborate false identity constructed by a man who filmed his victims and needed a plausible reason to own clay-sculpting tools and industrial-grade string.
She had absolutely no evidence for the string. She noted this too, and ignored it.
"So you're — an animator?" she asked, aiming for casual, landing somewhere closer to a customs officer.
"Stop-motion, yeah. Clay animation, mostly." Something shifted in his face when he said it — a flicker of pride quickly reined back in, like he wasn't fully sure it was allowed to be there. "It's for a kids' show, actually. Probably not what you'd expect, given—" He gestured at himself, at the general vicinity of his own face, in a way that suggested he was aware he did not look, at first glance, like a man who spent his days sculpting tiny woodland creatures out of clay.
"No, I mean — that's really cool," Zoey said, and found, with some alarm, that she meant it, which was deeply inconvenient given her current working theory. "What's the show?"
"It's called Sunny Meadow Friends. We're actually in the middle of this whole—" He caught himself, laughed a little. "Sorry, you really don't need the full production breakdown."
"No, go for it," Zoey said, leaning in slightly, telling herself this was purely investigative.
"Okay, so, we've got this arc where the wolf character — he's not actually a villain, that's kind of the whole twist of the season, he's just been misunderstood by the other animals — and there's this scene where he has to, like, process what happened with the missing carrot patch, which involves this whole sequence where he sort of mimes out what he thinks happened, very theatrically, because he's this dramatic little guy—" Leo demonstrated, unthinkingly, bringing one hand up and back behind his own neck in a rough approximation of the exact gesture Zoey had watched through her window the night before, "—like, strangled by his own guilt, basically, it's very silly, it's a kids' show, but the animation team keeps calling it 'the murder mime' as a joke and now I can't call it anything else either."
Zoey's entire nervous system experienced what could only be described as a pileup.
Murder mime. He'd said the words murder mime out loud, unprompted, with his own hand at his own throat, not twelve hours after she'd watched him do the exact same gesture through a lit window while she stood there clutching his diary of violent intentions.
"That's — " she said, and heard her own voice come out slightly strangled, which felt, in the moment, extremely on the nose. "That's a fun show."
"It's for six-year-olds," Leo said, with the faint, endearing embarrassment of someone who suspected his job sounded either more impressive or less impressive than it actually was and hadn't quite decided which. "I promise it's less dark than I just made it sound."
"No, no, I believe you," Zoey said, in the tone of someone who did not, currently, believe anyone about anything.
There was a small pause. Leo shifted the strap of his own bag onto his shoulder, glanced toward the door, then back at her, like he was deciding whether to say something.
"Hey, so — this is going to sound weird, given we've talked for like four minutes total," he said, "but I actually live right over there." He nodded toward the window, toward the building across the street, toward the exact lit apartment Zoey had spent half the night staring at with the fixed intensity of a woman building a case file. "Small world, right? I think I saw your building's for-lease sign go up a couple months back — did you just move in?"
"Recently, yeah," Zoey said, which was, at that precise moment, still technically true, though she was aware — with the sudden, dizzying clarity of a plan forming somewhere beneath her conscious thought — that it was about to become considerably more true, in ways she had not yet fully admitted to herself.
Because here was the thing: if she moved close enough — if she could actually watch — she wouldn't need to imagine, wouldn't need to guess, wouldn't need to rely on secondhand gestures glimpsed through blinds and interpret them badly. She could observe. Gather data. Build an actual case, methodically, the way a real investigator would, instead of jumping to conclusions off one notebook page and one very unfortunately-timed hand gesture.
It did not occur to her, standing there in the lobby with her own bag back in her arms and Leo's easy, unbothered smile in front of her, that this reasoning bore a suspicious resemblance to an excuse. It felt, from the inside, entirely rational. Professional, even.
"Well," Leo said, oblivious to the quiet, seismic shift happening approximately four feet away from him, "if you ever need anything — moving-in stuff, or you don't know a good coffee place around here, or whatever — I'm right there. Literally." He grinned, nodding at the window again. "I'd say knock any time, but I should warn you I'm usually covered in clay up to the elbow, so."
"I'll keep that in mind," Zoey said.
She meant it as a throwaway pleasantry. It did not feel like one, later, when she thought back on it — because by the time she rode the elevator back up to her own apartment, bag clutched to her chest, mind already turning over floor plans and lease listings and the exact walking distance between her building and his, she had already, quietly, irreversibly, begun building the case for why she needed to live somewhere much, much closer to a man she still, on some very stubborn level, suspected of unspeakable things.
She told herself it was strategy.
She told herself it was research.
She did not, even once, examine why some small, unhelpful part of her chest had gone warm and a little unsteady at the sight of his smile in the lobby, because that particular data point did not fit the case file she was building, and Zoey Ainsley — professional overthinker, reluctant amateur detective, and increasingly unreliable narrator of her own motives — had absolutely no intention of investigating that.
Not yet, anyway.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Zoey did not sleep so much as she lay very still in the dark, replaying the notebook's opening page against the inside of her eyelids like a horror movie trailer stuck on loop. By four in the morning she had catalogued every possible interpretation of the words strangulation, dusk, and pot, arranged in ascending order of how likely they were to end with her own name in a headline.
By six, she had made herself a cup of tea she never drank, sat down at her desk, and stared at the notebook the way one stares at an unexploded firework.
By seven, she had her phone in her hand, thumb hovering over the keypad, three numbers already typed.
9-1-1.
She stared at it for a long moment.
Then she imagined, with the horrible clarity of a woman who wrote dialogue for a living, exactly how that call would go.
"911, what's your emergency?" "Um, hi, yes, so — I think my new neighbor might be a serial killer? No, I haven't met him. Well, I met him once, briefly, at a cafe. No, he hasn't threatened me. It's just — I accidentally took his bag, and there was a notebook in it, and it said some things about a — a Little Strawberry, and dismemberment, and — no, I don't know who Little Strawberry is. No, I don't have his last name. I have his first name and the fact that he lives directly across the street from me, which, by the way, I only know because I was watching him through my window last night, which, in retrospect, might not be the detail I lead with —"
Zoey deleted the numbers one at a time.
"Okay," she said out loud, to the empty apartment, in the voice she used when she was building a case — not a legal case, just the internal, private kind she constructed to convince herself of things. "Okay. Think about this rationally."
She picked up the notebook again, this time with the clinical detachment of someone examining Exhibit A rather than someone actively panicking. She'd built a career, however wobbly it currently felt, on understanding criminal psychology — or at least on writing convincingly enough about it that no one had asked for a refund yet. And criminal psychology, she reminded herself, did not typically involve calling the police over four ambiguous sentences and zero corroborating evidence.
"If I go to the police with this," she told the notebook, as though it might argue back, "one of two things happens. Either they take one look at this and think I'm the unhinged one — which, fair — or they actually investigate, find out it's nothing, and I've just accused an innocent man of premeditated murder based on a diary I stole out of his bag."
Stole felt like a strong word. She revised it, silently, to acquired under circumstances beyond her control.
"Or," she continued, warming to her own logic now, "I do this properly. I observe. I gather information. I determine whether there's an actual threat before I ruin a man's life over what might just be —" she flipped back to the page, squinting at it in the daylight, "— an extremely violent to-do list."
She did not examine, at that particular moment, the fact that a normal person's next step after I've found a possibly incriminating document was not, generally, I will personally conduct a covert investigation, and not, say, I will hand this over to trained professionals whose entire job is investigating things. Zoey had spent six years being the smartest, most paranoid person in any room she'd ever written into existence, and some small, treacherous part of her brain had already decided that this was, essentially, the plot of her next book, except real, and she was the protagonist.
This was, she would later admit, not her finest piece of reasoning.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. The same unknown number as last night — already saved, she noticed with a faint flush of something she refused to name, under the contact name Leo (?!), complete with the punctuation she'd added at eleven p.m. in a fit of hysteria.
morning! no pressure at all, just wanted to check — is there a good time today to swap bags back? i have a bit of a deadline crunch so kind of need my sketchbook lol, but genuinely whenever works for you
Zoey read it three times.
Deadline crunch. Interesting. Suspects under deadline pressure, she noted, in the small back corner of her mind that never fully stopped narrating, often made mistakes. Got sloppy. Revealed things.
This, she decided, was her opening.
She could simply leave the bag with the building's doorman, as any reasonable, self-preserving human being would do, and never see this man again except through the safety of a fourth-floor window and several layers of curtain.
Or she could use this exchange — this perfectly ordinary, perfectly mundane bag swap — to look him directly in the eye and determine, once and for all, whether the man from the cafe was actually capable of the things scrawled in red ink on his notebook page.
It was, she told herself, the responsible thing to do. The safe thing, even. Know your enemy. Gather intelligence before you act. Any half-decent thriller writer knew that the amateur who ran straight to the authorities with insufficient evidence just ended up looking hysterical in chapter three, while the protagonist who did her own digging was the one who cracked the case.
She was, it did not occur to her to notice, essentially arguing herself into spending more time with the man she'd spent the entire night convinced was a murderer, using logic that would not have survived thirty seconds of scrutiny from anyone who wasn't currently operating on four hours of anxious, sleepless conviction.
She typed back: hey! no worries, totally understand the deadline thing. i'm home most of the morning if you want to swap in the lobby or something — whatever's easiest
She hit send before she could think too hard about the phrase whatever's easiest, which felt, in retrospect, slightly too friendly for a woman conducting a covert investigation into a possible murderer.
The reply came fast.
perfect, thank you!! i'll head down in like 20 min if that works? i'm across the street so it's like a 90 second walk lol
Zoey looked at the notebook one more time before she carefully — reverently, almost — closed it and slid it into her tote bag alongside his messenger bag, tools and all. She would return it exactly as she'd found it. Untouched. Unread. As far as anyone would ever know.
She spent the next twenty minutes doing something she would also, later, be too embarrassed to admit to anyone: she rehearsed.
Not what to say, exactly — she'd figured out a script for that easily enough, something breezy about coffee and mixed-up bags. What she rehearsed was her face. The specific arrangement of features a person makes when they are absolutely, definitely not sizing someone up for signs of homicidal tendencies. She practiced it in the hallway mirror three separate times, adjusting the angle of a friendly, unbothered smile until it looked less like a hostage negotiator and more like a normal woman who occasionally left her apartment.
By the time she made it down to the lobby, tote bag slung over one shoulder like a shield, she had almost convinced herself she looked completely at ease.
Leo was already there.
He was leaning against the mailboxes in a soft gray sweater, hair slightly damp like he'd just gotten out of the shower, and when he saw her, his whole face did something Zoey was wholly unprepared for — it lit up, unguarded and easy, the kind of smile that had absolutely no business belonging to someone with a red-ink notebook full of dismemberment instructions.
"Hey! Sorry, again, for the whole—" He gestured vaguely between them, a small, self-deprecating laugh. "I promise I'm not usually this disorganized. In my defense, our bags are genuinely identical, it's honestly kind of funny—"
"Totally fine," Zoey said, in a voice that came out approximately one octave higher than her regular speaking voice. She held out the messenger bag like it might detonate. "Here. Everything should be — I didn't really look through it or anything." A lie. A significant, structurally important lie.
"Oh, no worries even if you did, it's just clay tools and my sketchbook, nothing exciting." He took the bag, and in the same motion, held out hers — her actual bag, laptop and all, looking small and slightly apologetic in his hands. "Thank you so much for this. I would've been in real trouble without my sketchbook, I've got notes on, like, six weeks of storyboards in there."
Storyboards. Zoey filed this away. Consistent with the cover story of an animator. Or, she reminded herself, consistent with an elaborate false identity constructed by a man who filmed his victims and needed a plausible reason to own clay-sculpting tools and industrial-grade string.
She had absolutely no evidence for the string. She noted this too, and ignored it.
"So you're — an animator?" she asked, aiming for casual, landing somewhere closer to a customs officer.
"Stop-motion, yeah. Clay animation, mostly." Something shifted in his face when he said it — a flicker of pride quickly reined back in, like he wasn't fully sure it was allowed to be there. "It's for a kids' show, actually. Probably not what you'd expect, given—" He gestured at himself, at the general vicinity of his own face, in a way that suggested he was aware he did not look, at first glance, like a man who spent his days sculpting tiny woodland creatures out of clay.
"No, I mean — that's really cool," Zoey said, and found, with some alarm, that she meant it, which was deeply inconvenient given her current working theory. "What's the show?"
"It's called Sunny Meadow Friends. We're actually in the middle of this whole—" He caught himself, laughed a little. "Sorry, you really don't need the full production breakdown."
"No, go for it," Zoey said, leaning in slightly, telling herself this was purely investigative.
"Okay, so, we've got this arc where the wolf character — he's not actually a villain, that's kind of the whole twist of the season, he's just been misunderstood by the other animals — and there's this scene where he has to, like, process what happened with the missing carrot patch, which involves this whole sequence where he sort of mimes out what he thinks happened, very theatrically, because he's this dramatic little guy—" Leo demonstrated, unthinkingly, bringing one hand up and back behind his own neck in a rough approximation of the exact gesture Zoey had watched through her window the night before, "—like, strangled by his own guilt, basically, it's very silly, it's a kids' show, but the animation team keeps calling it 'the murder mime' as a joke and now I can't call it anything else either."
Zoey's entire nervous system experienced what could only be described as a pileup.
Murder mime. He'd said the words murder mime out loud, unprompted, with his own hand at his own throat, not twelve hours after she'd watched him do the exact same gesture through a lit window while she stood there clutching his diary of violent intentions.
"That's — " she said, and heard her own voice come out slightly strangled, which felt, in the moment, extremely on the nose. "That's a fun show."
"It's for six-year-olds," Leo said, with the faint, endearing embarrassment of someone who suspected his job sounded either more impressive or less impressive than it actually was and hadn't quite decided which. "I promise it's less dark than I just made it sound."
"No, no, I believe you," Zoey said, in the tone of someone who did not, currently, believe anyone about anything.
There was a small pause. Leo shifted the strap of his own bag onto his shoulder, glanced toward the door, then back at her, like he was deciding whether to say something.
"Hey, so — this is going to sound weird, given we've talked for like four minutes total," he said, "but I actually live right over there." He nodded toward the window, toward the building across the street, toward the exact lit apartment Zoey had spent half the night staring at with the fixed intensity of a woman building a case file. "Small world, right? I think I saw your building's for-lease sign go up a couple months back — did you just move in?"
"Recently, yeah," Zoey said, which was, at that precise moment, still technically true, though she was aware — with the sudden, dizzying clarity of a plan forming somewhere beneath her conscious thought — that it was about to become considerably more true, in ways she had not yet fully admitted to herself.
Because here was the thing: if she moved close enough — if she could actually watch — she wouldn't need to imagine, wouldn't need to guess, wouldn't need to rely on secondhand gestures glimpsed through blinds and interpret them badly. She could observe. Gather data. Build an actual case, methodically, the way a real investigator would, instead of jumping to conclusions off one notebook page and one very unfortunately-timed hand gesture.
It did not occur to her, standing there in the lobby with her own bag back in her arms and Leo's easy, unbothered smile in front of her, that this reasoning bore a suspicious resemblance to an excuse. It felt, from the inside, entirely rational. Professional, even.
"Well," Leo said, oblivious to the quiet, seismic shift happening approximately four feet away from him, "if you ever need anything — moving-in stuff, or you don't know a good coffee place around here, or whatever — I'm right there. Literally." He grinned, nodding at the window again. "I'd say knock any time, but I should warn you I'm usually covered in clay up to the elbow, so."
"I'll keep that in mind," Zoey said.
She meant it as a throwaway pleasantry. It did not feel like one, later, when she thought back on it — because by the time she rode the elevator back up to her own apartment, bag clutched to her chest, mind already turning over floor plans and lease listings and the exact walking distance between her building and his, she had already, quietly, irreversibly, begun building the case for why she needed to live somewhere much, much closer to a man she still, on some very stubborn level, suspected of unspeakable things.
She told herself it was strategy.
She told herself it was research.
She did not, even once, examine why some small, unhelpful part of her chest had gone warm and a little unsteady at the sight of his smile in the lobby, because that particular data point did not fit the case file she was building, and Zoey Ainsley — professional overthinker, reluctant amateur detective, and increasingly unreliable narrator of her own motives — had absolutely no intention of investigating that.
Not yet, anyway.
You've reached the end of this chapter