The cake, Zoey had to admit, was genuinely good. Suspiciously good, even, for a man she still had not fully ruled out as dangerous — the frosting was light, not too sweet, and he'd clearly put actual thought into the vanilla, which felt like an unreasonable amount of effort for someone supposedly busy with more sinister things.

She sat at his kitchen island, plate in front of her, eyes doing their level best to catalogue the room without looking like they were doing exactly that. A stack of sketchbooks by the window. A row of mismatched mugs on open shelving. A cork board covered in what looked like storyboard panels — little sequential drawings of a rabbit, a fox, the wolf from the trailer, all rendered in soft, rounded lines that seemed, against her will, almost soothing to look at.

Nothing that screamed lair. This was, if anything, an inconvenient amount of evidence in the wrong direction.

"So you just moved to the neighborhood too, or—?" Leo asked, leaning against the counter across from her, arms loosely crossed, a smear of frosting still visible near his jaw that Zoey had decided, firmly, not to mention.

"A few weeks ago," she said. "Still figuring out where everything is."

"Honestly, same, and I've been here two years." He laughed, a little self-deprecating. "I still get lost trying to find the good grocery store. The one with the good produce, not the one that's just, like, sad bananas and regret."

Zoey almost smiled before she caught herself. Focus. "What about you — you said the show's got a deadline? Sounds stressful."

"It is, kind of." Something in his expression shifted, subtle but real — the easy warmth dimming just slightly, replaced by something more careful. "We're pitching for a second season soon, which is — it's a big deal, actually, bigger than I probably let on. If it doesn't get picked up, that's kind of it for the studio's next couple years. No pressure or anything." He said the last part lightly, but Zoey noticed the way his hand found the edge of the counter and gripped it, just slightly, like he needed something solid to hold onto while he said it.

"That's a lot riding on one thing," she said, and meant it, and hated a little that she meant it.

"Yeah. My family's not exactly — " He stopped himself, waved a hand like he was physically batting the sentence out of the air. "Sorry, you don't need my whole life story over cake."

"No, it's fine," Zoey said, leaning in slightly, and this time she wasn't entirely sure whether it was investigative instinct or genuine curiosity driving the question. "Not exactly what?"

"Not exactly thrilled about the whole clay animation thing," he admitted, with a small, wry twist of his mouth. "It's a whole conversation. Family full of lawyers and doctors, and then there's me, gluing tiny felt hats onto sculptures of rabbits for a living." He said it like a joke, but there was something underneath it that didn't quite land as one — something tired, something old.

Zoey filed this away too, though not, this time, in the case file. Somewhere else. Somewhere she wasn't examining very closely.

"I think that's kind of incredible, actually," she said, before she could stop herself. "Making something that whole from scratch. Most people can't even commit to finishing a to-do list."

Leo looked at her for a second longer than the comment probably warranted, like he hadn't expected it, and something in his face softened in a way that made Zoey suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how close she was sitting to a man she'd spent the last twenty-four hours suspecting of premeditated murder.

"Thanks," he said, simply. "Not everyone gets that."

The conversation drifted after that — easy, unremarkable things, the kind of small talk two new neighbors might actually have, and by the time Zoey excused herself, plate empty, the sun long since down, she had gathered, technically, nothing. No further evidence. No smoking gun. Just a man who made good cake, worried about his family, and had a habit of talking about his job with his hands, animated and a little too fast, like he loved it more than he was comfortable admitting.

It was not, she reflected on the walk back to her own building, the profile of a killer.

It was, if she was being honest with herself — which she was determined not to be, not tonight — considerably more concerning than that.

Back in her apartment, Zoey sat down at her desk, pulled out the notepad she'd carried with her the entire evening, and opened it to a blank page.

She stared at it for a long moment.

Then she wrote, at the top, in the careful, deliberate handwriting she used when she wanted to feel like she was doing something official: Case Notes — Subject: L.

Below that, she made a list.

Evidence against: One notebook page (red ink, disturbing content, questionable authorship not yet confirmed). One hand gesture visible through window (context: possibly work-related, unconfirmed). One knife (context: cake, confirmed).

She looked at the list for a while.

Evidence for normalcy: Employed, verifiable job. Apologizes excessively. Bakes. Talks about family with visible discomfort, consistent with normal human being who has a family. Makes good vanilla frosting, which frankly should not be relevant but somehow feels relevant.

She set down her pen.

The problem, and she could see it clearly now, laid out in her own handwriting in front of her, was that the actual, hard evidence against Leo currently amounted to one ambiguous page and one out-of-context gesture, both of which had a perfectly reasonable innocent explanation readily available. Any half-competent investigator — fictional or otherwise — would look at this case file and tell her, gently but firmly, to close it.

This should have been a relief.

Instead, Zoey felt something close to panic.

Because if the case was thin — if there wasn't, really, anything here — then what was she doing? What was the actual, underlying reason she'd spent the last twenty minutes at his kitchen island learning about his family and his deadline and the exact quality of his frosting, when a rational person, satisfied there was no threat, would simply have said a polite goodnight and moved on with her life?

She didn't examine this question for very long. Some part of her — the part that had spent six years building elaborate structures around difficult truths, disguising them as plot twists so she wouldn't have to look at them directly — was already reaching for a different explanation, one that felt considerably safer.

The most dangerous ones are the ones who seem harmless, she reminded herself, picking the pen back up, underlining the words questionable authorship not yet confirmed twice, hard enough to nearly tear the page. That's the whole point of a good cover. That's Criminology 101.

It did not occur to her — or rather, it occurred to her, distantly, and was firmly, deliberately ignored — that she had just spent an entire evening gathering evidence that pointed overwhelmingly toward Leo being exactly what he said he was, and had responded to that evidence not by standing down, but by deciding she simply hadn't looked hard enough yet.

She needed more data. Continuous data. Not one evening's worth of stolen glances through a kitchen window, but real, sustained observation — the kind that only worked if she had eyes on him regularly, reliably, without having to invent an excuse each time.

She opened her laptop.

She told herself, as she typed apartments for rent near me into the search bar, that this was simply thoroughness. Diligence. The kind of commitment to the truth that separated a serious investigator from an amateur who gave up after one inconclusive slice of cake.

The listings loaded. Zoey scrolled, mostly out of habit, past studios too far away, past buildings that didn't have the right sightlines, until — there. A one-bedroom, available immediately, third floor, in the building directly across the street. She pulled up the floor plan. The bedroom window, according to the listing photos, faced east.

Directly toward Leo's building. Directly, if her mental math was correct, toward his kitchen.

Her heart did something complicated and slightly indecent at the sight of it, a small, hot flicker of something that was absolutely not supposed to be excitement, and she pushed the feeling down hard enough that she nearly missed the moment her thumb had already tapped Schedule a Viewing before her brain had finished the sentence this is purely for surveillance purposes.

The confirmation came back instantly: a viewing, tomorrow at eleven a.m.

Zoey stared at the screen, notepad open beside her, case file thinner than it had any right to be, and felt a strange, giddy nervousness settle low in her stomach — the kind she hadn't felt in years, not about a plot twist, not about a deadline, not about anything remotely related to her actual career.

She told herself it was adrenaline. The thrill of the chase. The rush of closing in on a case.

She did not let herself consider, even for a second, that it might be something considerably simpler and considerably more dangerous than that — the particular, specific nervousness of a woman who had just found a very good excuse to move closer to someone she was starting, against every instinct she had, to like.

"It's strategic," she told the empty apartment, closing her laptop with more force than necessary. "It's a professional decision."

Across the street, entirely unaware that he had just become the subject of a formal relocation, Leo washed the last of the frosting off his one good knife, hummed something tuneless under his breath, and thought, not for the first time that evening, that his new neighbor had a very interesting way of looking at a room — like she was memorizing it. He found it, against all reason, kind of charming.

He had absolutely no idea what he'd just set in motion.