Leo had been quiet since morning, the particular quiet Zoey had learned, over the past weeks, to read as pre-storm stillness rather than genuine calm. He'd left for the studio in a shirt she recognized as his "important meeting" shirt — the one without a single visible fleck of clay dust, pressed with more care than his usual work attire warranted — and he'd texted her only once during the day, a short, tense message that read simply: big meeting today. wish me luck.

She'd sent back a string of encouraging nonsense and a photo of Mochi looking unimpressed, and then spent the rest of the afternoon unable to concentrate on anything, checking her phone every few minutes with a nervousness that felt, by now, entirely earned.

He knocked on her door a little after six, and she knew before he said a single word that it hadn't gone well.

"Hey," he said, and even that single syllable carried the weight of something heavy, his usual easy posture replaced by a kind of careful, contained exhaustion.

"That bad?" Zoey asked, stepping back to let him in.

"Not — not catastrophic," Leo said, dropping onto her couch with the particular heaviness of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying since morning. "Just. Clarifying."

"Clarifying how?"

He was quiet for a moment, rubbing a hand over his face. "Marcus laid it out pretty plainly. If we can't show concrete numbers — real commercial traction, not just, quote, 'a nice little internet following' — within two weeks, the second season gets shelved. Not canceled outright, he was careful about the wording, but shelved indefinitely, which everyone in that room understood to mean the same thing."

"Two weeks," Zoey repeated, the unfairness of it landing somewhere sharp in her chest. "That's — that's not enough time to prove anything real."

"That's the point, probably," Leo said, with a short, humorless laugh. "Doesn't leave much room to actually succeed. Just enough room to fail on schedule."

Something hot and protective flared up in Zoey immediately, an old, familiar instinct rising before she could examine it properly — the same fierce, reflexive urge to do something, to intervene, to solve this the way she'd once tried to solve every problem in her life: by investigating, plotting, taking matters into her own hands.

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked, already half-formulating a dozen impractical schemes — could she write something, review the show publicly, rally some kind of fan campaign, march into Marcus's office herself and explain, in detail, exactly what kind of person he was —

"No," Leo said, gently, catching something in her expression that clearly telegraphed the direction her thoughts had taken. "There's no fixing this with a plan, Zoey. It's not that kind of problem."

She sat down beside him, some of her urgency deflating into a quieter, more helpless kind of worry. "Okay. But I'm still furious on your behalf."

"Appreciated." A small, tired smile, gone almost as quickly as it appeared. He was silent for a long moment, staring at some middle distance across her living room, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone smaller, more uncertain than she was used to hearing from him. "You know what's funny? Sitting in that meeting, listening to Marcus talk about 'commercial viability' like the whole thing is just numbers on a spreadsheet — I kept thinking about my dad. The exact way he used to say things like that. Like the actual value of something doesn't matter if you can't put a number on it."

"Leo—"

"Maybe they're right, though," he continued, quieter still, something raw slipping through the careful composure he usually maintained. "Maybe this was always going to be the outcome. Some — nice hobby I convinced myself was a real career, right up until someone with an actual spreadsheet came along and proved otherwise."

"That's not true," Zoey said, sharper than she meant to, the words coming out fast and fierce. "Leo, I have watched you pour more care into four-inch clay figures than most people put into anything in their entire lives. I've seen the show. I've seen the way people at that party talked about you, the way your whole team lights up when you walk in a room. That's not nothing. That's not a hobby."

"I know you believe that," Leo said, and there was real gratitude in it, real warmth, but also something underneath that didn't quite let her words land the way she wanted them to. "I just — I don't know if I believe it right now. Not really. Not the way I'd need to, to actually fight for it."

Zoey felt something helpless rise in her chest — the specific, frustrating helplessness of watching someone she loved drowning in doubt that no amount of reassurance from her seemed able to fully dispel. She reached for his hand, and he let her take it, but his fingers stayed loose in hers, present but not quite grounded.

"I need some time to think," Leo said, after a long moment, gently disentangling himself, standing slowly. "Not — not away from you. Just. In my own head for a bit. Is that okay?"

"Of course," Zoey said, though something in her chest ached at the careful distance in it, the sense of a man retreating somewhere she couldn't quite follow.

He kissed her forehead at the door, soft and a little absent, and left with a small, tired wave, and Zoey stood in her doorway for a long moment afterward, watching his door close across the hall, feeling a particular kind of fear settle into her chest that had nothing to do with notebooks or suspicion or any danger she could investigate her way out of.

She sat down at her desk that evening, opened her notebook out of habit, and found she had nothing analytical to write at all — no evidence to catalogue, no case to build. Just a plain, simple worry, the kind that came with genuinely loving someone: the fear that he was standing at the edge of an old wound, and that this time, no amount of hedgehogs or patient waiting on her part could fully protect him from falling into it.

I'm scared, she wrote finally, the handwriting small and honest. Not of him. For him. I don't know how to fix this, and I hate not knowing how to fix things. But I think maybe this isn't mine to fix. I think this is something he has to find his own way through, and all I can do is stay close enough to catch him if he needs it.

She closed the notebook and looked across the street, where Leo's light stayed on much later than usual that night — a single, small figure at his workbench, not sculpting, not moving much at all, simply sitting there in the quiet, wrestling with something Zoey couldn't see and couldn't yet help him carry.

She didn't sleep well. She kept thinking about the particular way his voice had gone small when he talked about his father, the exact, careful defeat in it, and found herself hoping — fiercely, uselessly, from across a dark and silent street — that whatever he was fighting tonight, some part of him still remembered what she'd told him, even if he couldn't quite believe it yet.