By the second day, Zoey noticed the light in Leo's workshop staying on well past midnight. By the third, it hadn't gone off at all before she woke, the pale gray of early morning finding him still hunched over his workbench when she glanced across the street on her way to make coffee.
She recognized the pattern immediately, and hated recognizing it — the particular, driven quality of someone trying to outrun a fear by outworking it, throwing every waking hour at a problem as if sheer volume of effort could substitute for the confidence he no longer fully possessed. She'd done something similar once, in a different form — six years of building an entire career out of imagining worst-case scenarios so thoroughly that she never had to sit still with her own fear long enough to actually feel it.
She brought coffee over on the fourth morning, not as an excuse this time but simply because she was worried, and found him exactly where she expected: hollow-eyed, hunched over a half-finished storyboard sequence, three empty mugs already crowding the edge of his desk, papers spread in the particular chaos of a man who had stopped organizing his thoughts hours ago and was simply generating them as fast as his hand could move.
"Hey," she said gently, setting the fresh one down among the others. "When did you last sleep?"
"I slept," Leo said, not looking up, pencil moving fast across the page. "Some. Enough."
"That's not an answer."
"I don't have time for a better one." He finally glanced up, and the exhaustion in his face made something in Zoey's chest ache. "Two weeks, Zoey. I need every single one of them if I'm going to have anything real to show Marcus."
"You also need to not collapse before you get there," she said, carefully, sitting on the stool beside him, resisting the urge to simply take the pencil out of his hand. "There's a difference between working hard and running yourself into the ground."
"I know," Leo said, in the tone of someone who knew intellectually but had no current intention of acting on the knowledge. "I just — I can't stop right now. If I stop, I start thinking, and if I start thinking, I hear my dad's voice, and I really don't have room in my head for that on top of everything else."
Zoey watched him for a long moment, understanding, with a clarity that ached, exactly what he was doing — burying an old wound under an avalanche of frantic productivity, the same way she'd once buried her own fear under an elaborate murder investigation that had never actually been about murder at all.
"Okay," she said finally, quietly. "I'm not going to tell you to stop. But I'm going to sit here while you work, if that's okay. You don't have to talk. I'll just be here."
Leo's hand paused over the page. He looked at her — really looked, some of the frantic edge in his expression softening slightly at the offer — and nodded, wordless, before returning to his sketching.
She stayed for two hours that morning, saying little, occasionally refilling his water glass, once gently redirecting his hand away from his coffee mug toward an actual glass of water instead, and found that her presence alone seemed to slow, marginally, the frantic pace of his pencil — not stopping him, not fixing anything, but simply making the burden feel, perhaps, a fraction lighter for being witnessed.
It became a pattern over the following days. She didn't push him to rest. She didn't lecture him about self-care, or point out — though she desperately wanted to — that he was quite visibly running on fumes. She simply showed up, quietly, consistently, sitting nearby while he worked himself toward whatever proof he was trying to build, offering the one thing she'd learned, from him, that mattered most: patient, undemanding presence.
She noticed small things during those visits that worried her more than she let on. The way his hand had developed a faint, persistent tremor by the third afternoon, barely noticeable unless you were watching closely. The way he'd started skipping meals entirely, apologizing distractedly when she pointed out an untouched sandwich going stale on the corner of his desk. The particular, glassy quality his eyes took on by early evening, the look of someone operating well past the point his body actually wanted to stop.
Once, on the fifth day, she found him asleep sitting upright at his workbench, pencil still loosely gripped in one hand, head tipped forward at an angle that would clearly hurt his neck when he woke. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, torn between letting him rest and worrying that he'd wake disoriented and immediately dive back into work without having actually recovered anything.
She chose, in the end, to simply drape a blanket over his shoulders and sit quietly on the couch nearby, keeping watch, until he stirred an hour later with a start, blinking blearily at his surroundings before his gaze found her.
"You didn't wake me," he said, voice rough with sleep, something almost accusatory in it.
"You needed it," Zoey said, simply. "I wasn't going to take that away from you."
He rubbed a hand over his face, looking, for just a moment, genuinely young and lost in a way that made her chest ache. "I feel like I'm losing," he admitted, quietly. "Not just the show. Like — I don't know. Like I'm losing whatever thread makes any of this feel worth doing."
"You're not losing," Zoey said, firm despite the gentleness in her voice. "You're exhausted. Those aren't the same thing, even if they feel identical at three in the morning."
Leo looked at her for a long moment, something in his expression too tired to fully hide the depth of what he was carrying. "I hope you're right," he said, and returned, after a moment, to his workbench — slower this time, she noticed, marginally less frantic, though the underlying urgency hadn't gone anywhere at all.
It wasn't enough, not really. She could see that. The circles under his eyes deepened by the day, his usual easy warmth thinning into something more brittle, more effortful. But it was something, and for now, it was all either of them seemed to know how to offer.
She lay awake one of those nights, staring at her ceiling, thinking about the particular cruelty of watching someone you loved hurt themselves trying to prove they mattered, when the truest thing you knew — the thing you couldn't seem to make them believe no matter how many times you said it — was that they already did.
You've reached the end of this chapter
By the second day, Zoey noticed the light in Leo's workshop staying on well past midnight. By the third, it hadn't gone off at all before she woke, the pale gray of early morning finding him still hunched over his workbench when she glanced across the street on her way to make coffee.
She recognized the pattern immediately, and hated recognizing it — the particular, driven quality of someone trying to outrun a fear by outworking it, throwing every waking hour at a problem as if sheer volume of effort could substitute for the confidence he no longer fully possessed. She'd done something similar once, in a different form — six years of building an entire career out of imagining worst-case scenarios so thoroughly that she never had to sit still with her own fear long enough to actually feel it.
She brought coffee over on the fourth morning, not as an excuse this time but simply because she was worried, and found him exactly where she expected: hollow-eyed, hunched over a half-finished storyboard sequence, three empty mugs already crowding the edge of his desk, papers spread in the particular chaos of a man who had stopped organizing his thoughts hours ago and was simply generating them as fast as his hand could move.
"Hey," she said gently, setting the fresh one down among the others. "When did you last sleep?"
"I slept," Leo said, not looking up, pencil moving fast across the page. "Some. Enough."
"That's not an answer."
"I don't have time for a better one." He finally glanced up, and the exhaustion in his face made something in Zoey's chest ache. "Two weeks, Zoey. I need every single one of them if I'm going to have anything real to show Marcus."
"You also need to not collapse before you get there," she said, carefully, sitting on the stool beside him, resisting the urge to simply take the pencil out of his hand. "There's a difference between working hard and running yourself into the ground."
"I know," Leo said, in the tone of someone who knew intellectually but had no current intention of acting on the knowledge. "I just — I can't stop right now. If I stop, I start thinking, and if I start thinking, I hear my dad's voice, and I really don't have room in my head for that on top of everything else."
Zoey watched him for a long moment, understanding, with a clarity that ached, exactly what he was doing — burying an old wound under an avalanche of frantic productivity, the same way she'd once buried her own fear under an elaborate murder investigation that had never actually been about murder at all.
"Okay," she said finally, quietly. "I'm not going to tell you to stop. But I'm going to sit here while you work, if that's okay. You don't have to talk. I'll just be here."
Leo's hand paused over the page. He looked at her — really looked, some of the frantic edge in his expression softening slightly at the offer — and nodded, wordless, before returning to his sketching.
She stayed for two hours that morning, saying little, occasionally refilling his water glass, once gently redirecting his hand away from his coffee mug toward an actual glass of water instead, and found that her presence alone seemed to slow, marginally, the frantic pace of his pencil — not stopping him, not fixing anything, but simply making the burden feel, perhaps, a fraction lighter for being witnessed.
It became a pattern over the following days. She didn't push him to rest. She didn't lecture him about self-care, or point out — though she desperately wanted to — that he was quite visibly running on fumes. She simply showed up, quietly, consistently, sitting nearby while he worked himself toward whatever proof he was trying to build, offering the one thing she'd learned, from him, that mattered most: patient, undemanding presence.
She noticed small things during those visits that worried her more than she let on. The way his hand had developed a faint, persistent tremor by the third afternoon, barely noticeable unless you were watching closely. The way he'd started skipping meals entirely, apologizing distractedly when she pointed out an untouched sandwich going stale on the corner of his desk. The particular, glassy quality his eyes took on by early evening, the look of someone operating well past the point his body actually wanted to stop.
Once, on the fifth day, she found him asleep sitting upright at his workbench, pencil still loosely gripped in one hand, head tipped forward at an angle that would clearly hurt his neck when he woke. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, torn between letting him rest and worrying that he'd wake disoriented and immediately dive back into work without having actually recovered anything.
She chose, in the end, to simply drape a blanket over his shoulders and sit quietly on the couch nearby, keeping watch, until he stirred an hour later with a start, blinking blearily at his surroundings before his gaze found her.
"You didn't wake me," he said, voice rough with sleep, something almost accusatory in it.
"You needed it," Zoey said, simply. "I wasn't going to take that away from you."
He rubbed a hand over his face, looking, for just a moment, genuinely young and lost in a way that made her chest ache. "I feel like I'm losing," he admitted, quietly. "Not just the show. Like — I don't know. Like I'm losing whatever thread makes any of this feel worth doing."
"You're not losing," Zoey said, firm despite the gentleness in her voice. "You're exhausted. Those aren't the same thing, even if they feel identical at three in the morning."
Leo looked at her for a long moment, something in his expression too tired to fully hide the depth of what he was carrying. "I hope you're right," he said, and returned, after a moment, to his workbench — slower this time, she noticed, marginally less frantic, though the underlying urgency hadn't gone anywhere at all.
It wasn't enough, not really. She could see that. The circles under his eyes deepened by the day, his usual easy warmth thinning into something more brittle, more effortful. But it was something, and for now, it was all either of them seemed to know how to offer.
She lay awake one of those nights, staring at her ceiling, thinking about the particular cruelty of watching someone you loved hurt themselves trying to prove they mattered, when the truest thing you knew — the thing you couldn't seem to make them believe no matter how many times you said it — was that they already did.
You've reached the end of this chapter