The outline was not going well.

Zoey had opened the document at nine that morning with genuine, if slightly delusional, optimism — today, she'd told herself, today she would produce something her editor could actually use — and by noon she had written exactly one sentence: The killer always returns to the scene of the crime. She had then spent the following three hours staring at that sentence with the particular blankness of someone whose brain had quietly relocated to a much more interesting problem down the hall.

Or, more accurately, across the street.

She'd tried, briefly, to do this properly. Around one o'clock she had opened her laptop, typed Sunny Meadow Friends into the search bar with the brisk efficiency of a woman conducting due diligence, and found — after considerable scrolling — exactly one thing: a thirty-second trailer clip, low view count, showing a soft-focus clay meadow and a cast of round, friendly-looking animal characters that did not, on their face, suggest anything sinister. There was a rabbit. There was, notably, a wolf who looked less like a predator and more like he'd had a difficult morning and would like to talk about his feelings.

It proved nothing, she told herself. Anyone could make a children's show as a front. In fact — and here her thriller-writer brain lit up with unhelpful enthusiasm — a children's animation studio was exactly the kind of soft, wholesome cover a genuinely dangerous person might choose, precisely because no one would ever suspect it. She made a mental note of this insight, and then, because she had apparently decided her own paranoid theorizing counted as productive research, closed the laptop and told herself she'd earned a break.

The break lasted until dusk, when she found herself standing by her window again — not on purpose, she told herself, simply because that was where the light happened to be good for stretching — and saw, through the gap in Leo's blinds, a scene that stopped her mid-stretch entirely.

He was in his kitchen. He had a knife in one hand — a large one, the kind with real heft to it — and he was bent over something on the counter with a level of focus that Zoey, from this distance, could only describe as unsettling. His arm moved in short, controlled strokes. Down. Down. Down again.

Cutting.

Zoey's stomach dropped somewhere near her ankles.

She could not see, from this angle, what exactly was on the counter. She could not see the pale, obviously inanimate shape of a sheet cake, or the neat rows of frosted stars he was carving into its surface with the tip of the knife, or the smear of vanilla buttercream on his sleeve, or the small, satisfied hum he was making under his breath as he worked. What she saw was a large knife, a repetitive cutting motion, and a man whose face — half-lit by the kitchen light, brow furrowed in concentration — looked, from four stories away and through a gap in the blinds, exactly like the face of someone doing something they very much did not want interrupted.

"Okay," Zoey whispered, backing away from the window like it had grown teeth. "Okay, okay, that's — that's a knife. That's a very large knife."

Her hand found the water glass on her desk without her quite deciding to reach for it, and in her haste to set it down somewhere safe — somewhere that wasn't, apparently, the actual desk — it slipped, hit the floor, and shattered into a spray of glass and lukewarm tap water across her rug.

She didn't even look at it. She was too busy replaying, in horrified detail, every syllable of the notebook's opening page. Must be dismembered into four pieces. The knife. The methodical, repetitive motion. The concentration on his face, the kind of concentration a person only wore when the task in front of them genuinely mattered to them.

It's happening, some overheated corner of her brain informed her, with the breathless urgency of a woman narrating the climax of her own thriller novel. He's doing it right now. Tonight. Little Strawberry doesn't have until dusk in the park — he's moved up the timeline.

She spun in a slow circle in the middle of her living room, glass crunching faintly under one sock, trying to decide what a competent, prepared woman would do in this exact situation. Call the police, a small, sane fragment of her suggested. She dismissed it instantly — she still had no last name, no address he'd admit to on record, nothing but a notebook she'd technically obtained by accident and a knife visible through someone else's window, which, she was fairly sure, was not a crime.

She needed proof. Real, undeniable proof, gathered with her own two eyes, close enough that there'd be no ambiguity left to argue away.

She needed, in short, to get inside that apartment.

It was at this precise moment — glass still scattered across her rug, water still soaking into the fibers, heart still hammering somewhere up near her collarbone — that her phone buzzed.

hey!! random question but do you like sheet cake lol. i tried a new vanilla frosting recipe and now i have an entire cake i can't possibly eat by myself, if you're around and want to come try a piece, no pressure at all

Zoey stared at the message. Then at the window, where the light was still on, where the shape of him was still moving behind the blinds, unhurried, entirely unaware that the woman across the street currently believed him to be finishing off a body.

Every rational thought she possessed — and there were, admittedly, fewer of these currently in circulation than usual — screamed that walking directly into the apartment of a man she suspected of active dismemberment was, by any reasonable measure, an extremely poor life decision. A protagonist in one of her own novels who did this would get precisely one chapter of screen time before becoming a cautionary tale in chapter two.

But then again — and here was the treacherous, familiar logic that had gotten her into this in the first place — what better way to know for certain? If she went now, tonight, under the entirely plausible cover of accepting a neighborly slice of cake, she could see the counter for herself. See whether there was, God forbid, anything on it that shouldn't be. Confirm, once and for all, whether the man across the street was exactly what he claimed to be, or something considerably darker wearing a very convincing costume of clay figurines and kids' TV.

It was reckless. It was, quite possibly, insane.

It was also, she realized with a strange, hot little thrill she chose not to examine too closely, the single most compelling piece of investigative opportunity she'd been handed in her entire six-year career of writing about people who did exactly this sort of thing and lived to regret it.

Zoey, said the small, sensible part of her brain, one last time, faintly, from somewhere very far away. This is how the second act starts in every single one of your books. This is the part where the reader yells at the character not to go inside.

She looked down at the shattered glass on her rug. She looked at the message glowing on her phone screen. She looked, finally, at the window across the street, where Leo's silhouette had paused, phone presumably now checked, presumably waiting for her answer.

She typed back before she could talk herself out of it.

i actually love cake. give me like ten minutes?

She set the phone down, and then — because some habits ran deeper than fear, deeper than common sense, deeper, apparently, than basic self-preservation — she went and got a small notepad from her desk drawer, the one she used for jotting down plot ideas, and slipped it into her back pocket.

If she was walking into what might be a crime scene, she reasoned, she was at least going to take notes.

She did not, in the ten minutes it took her to change out of her at-home clothes and cross the street, once stop to consider that the notepad in her pocket was rapidly becoming less a tool of investigation and more the founding document of something else entirely — a running, secret record of a man she was, despite every ounce of evidence she thought she had against him, becoming helplessly, hopelessly curious about.

She would realize this later. Much later.

For now, she simply pressed the buzzer to apartment 4B, heart in her throat, notepad in her pocket, and waited for the door of what she was fairly convinced might be a murderer's lair to open in front of her.

It opened almost immediately.

Leo stood there in a flour-dusted apron over his sweater, a smear of frosting on one cheekbone, holding the door open with one hand and, in the other, an enormous slice of sheet cake balanced precariously on a plate that was clearly not designed to hold quite this much cake.

"You're either about to tell me this is a terrible idea," he said, grinning, "or you're just really, really into vanilla frosting. Either way — welcome. Sorry about the flour situation, I promise the actual apartment's cleaner than I currently look."

Zoey opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked past him into the apartment — searching, despite herself, for any sign of the knife, the counter, anything at all that might confirm or deny the entire elaborate case she'd built in her head over the last twenty minutes.

She saw a kitchen counter dusted with flour. A mixing bowl. A perfectly ordinary, entirely un-menacing sheet cake with slightly uneven frosting stars carved across the top.

And on the cutting board beside it, still faintly damp, the knife — a plain kitchen knife, blade clean, handle resting exactly where he'd set it down.

"So," Leo said, watching her face with the faint, oblivious warmth of someone who had absolutely no idea he was, at that moment, the prime suspect in an investigation he didn't know existed. "Coming in, or should I just hand the cake through the doorway?"

Zoey looked at the knife one more time. Then at him. Then, finally, stepped over the threshold — notepad still in her pocket, case file still, technically, wide open — and told herself, with the same shaky, unconvincing conviction she'd used all week, that this was simply good detective work.

It did not feel, in that moment, quite like detective work at all.