The apartment was, on paper, perfectly ordinary. One bedroom, decent light, a kitchen slightly too small for the amount of enthusiasm Zoey did not currently possess for cooking. The listing agent — a cheerful, unhurried woman named Priya who clearly viewed her job as part real estate, part therapy — walked Zoey through it with the practiced patter of someone who had given this exact tour forty times that month alone.

"And this is the real selling point," Priya said, pulling back the blinds in the bedroom with a small flourish, like she was unveiling a prize on a game show. "Great light in the mornings, and you've got a really nice view straight across at the building opposite. No one's blocking you, no construction going up anytime soon that I know of."

Zoey looked out the window.

Directly across the narrow street, at almost exactly eye level, sat a lit apartment with a corkboard visible through the glass, a scatter of clay tools on a windowsill, and — very faintly, out of focus but unmistakable — a plump orange shape she now recognized as Mochi, draped over the back of a couch like a throw pillow that had given up on life.

"It's perfect," Zoey said, before she could stop herself, and then, because that had come out with slightly more conviction than a normal viewing warranted, added, "— for the light. Great light."

"Right?" Priya beamed, entirely unaware she'd just witnessed the single most consequential real estate decision of the year. "A lot of tenants love that view. Very open, very airy."

Zoey signed the lease that same afternoon, at a small folding table in the leasing office, with the calm, businesslike efficiency of a woman making a purely practical decision about square footage and commute times. She did not examine, while signing, the fact that she had not once asked about the building's laundry situation, or parking, or literally any of the things a normal apartment-hunter asked about. She had asked, exactly once, in a tone she hoped sounded casual, whether the lease could start as soon as possible.

It could. Priya seemed delighted by her enthusiasm for moving quickly. Zoey did not correct the assumption that this enthusiasm had anything to do with the apartment itself.

Moving day arrived two days later, gray-skied and slightly drizzling, the kind of weather that made hauling boxes considerably less pleasant than it already was. Zoey had recruited exactly no help, on the theory that fewer witnesses meant fewer people asking pointed questions about why she'd chosen this specific building, and had consequently spent the better part of an hour wrestling a box of books across the lobby with the grim determination of someone who had made her bed and now had to lie, heavily, in a pile of hardcovers on top of it.

She did not expect to run into Leo in the lobby of her own new building. She had, in fact, specifically timed her move for a weekday afternoon under the vague assumption that he'd be at the studio.

He was not at the studio. He was standing by the mailboxes — again, she noted, with the small, treacherous part of her brain that had started keeping an entirely separate, unhelpful file labeled things I have noticed about Leo that are not evidence of anything — sorting through a stack of mail, and he looked up at the sound of the box scraping against the door and broke into the kind of surprised, delighted grin that made Zoey's grip on the box loosen slightly, which was, given the weight of the box, a genuinely dangerous development.

"Wait." He set the mail down entirely. "Are you — you're moving in? Here?"

"Apparently," Zoey said, adjusting her grip before the box could finish its slow-motion journey toward the floor. "Small world, right?"

"That's — " He laughed, an easy, surprised sound, crossing the lobby toward her without seeming to think about it at all. "Okay, that's honestly kind of incredible. What floor?"

"Third."

"I'm on four, across from you, basically." He said this like it was the best news he'd received all week, which struck Zoey as either deeply suspicious or deeply, unhelpfully sweet, and she was having an increasingly hard time deciding which. "Here, let me—" He was already reaching for the box before she could protest, lifting it clean out of her arms like it weighed nothing, which it did not, and Zoey found herself standing in the lobby with considerably less to hold onto and a distinct, uncomfortable feeling that she had lost control of the situation.

"You really don't have to—"

"I've got two working arms and nothing better to do until my four o'clock call," Leo said, already heading toward the elevator. "Which box first?"

This was, Zoey reflected, watching him wait for her by the elevator with her box of books balanced casually against one hip, precisely the kind of scenario she should be avoiding. A good investigator did not accept unsolicited help from her subject. A good investigator maintained careful, professional distance, did not let herself be charmed by strong forearms and an easy laugh, did not, under any circumstances, find herself grateful for the exact kind of unprompted, no-strings-attached generosity that made her chest do something warm and unhelpful.

She followed him into the elevator anyway.

They made three more trips after that — Leo insisting each time, waving off her protests with a cheerful seriously, it's fine, I do this for the studio all the time, we haul way heavier stuff than this — and by the fourth trip, carrying the last and heaviest box between them, something in Zoey's carefully maintained investigative distance had begun, quietly, to erode.

It happened on the stairs, actually, not the elevator — the elevator had briefly stalled on the second floor, and rather than wait, they'd opted for the stairwell, each gripping one side of a box heavy enough that neither of them could have managed it alone. Halfway up, Zoey's grip slipped slightly on the corner, and Leo's hand shot out instinctively to catch the weight before it could tip, landing directly over hers on the cardboard edge.

For one full second, neither of them moved.

His hand was warm. Zoey noted this with the detached horror of someone cataloguing evidence they very much did not want to catalogue. Warm, and steady, and entirely too close to hers on a box of what was, embarrassingly, mostly just her collection of crime novels — every single one of which she was now acutely aware he could see the spines of, stacked and visible where the box flap had come loose.

"Got it?" Leo asked, voice slightly rough from the climb, close enough that she could see the small, startled flicker in his own expression — like he'd noticed the same thing she had, and wasn't entirely sure what to do about it either.

"Got it," Zoey said, and did not, in fact, have it, in any sense of the word that mattered.

They finished the climb in a silence that felt considerably louder than the conversation that had preceded it, and by the time they set the box down in her new living room, Zoey found herself intensely focused on the act of straightening a stack of magazines that did not need straightening, purely so she would have somewhere else to look.

"Well," Leo said, a little breathless, rubbing the back of his neck in a way Zoey was beginning to recognize as a tell of some kind, though she hadn't yet determined for what. "Welcome to the building. For real, this time."

"Thanks. For the help." She gestured vaguely at the stack of boxes. "You really didn't have to do all that."

"Wanted to," he said, simply, like it wasn't a complicated thing to admit. "It's nice having someone around who isn't, like, allergic to my cat or scared of clay dust everywhere." A beat. "You're not allergic to cats, right? Because Mochi has strong opinions about people who sneeze at him."

"Not allergic," Zoey confirmed, and did not mention that the last time she'd been in a room with his cat, she'd been crouched in his closet clutching a notepad, actively suspecting him of homicide. Some details, she decided, could remain permanently in the case file, unshared.

He left not long after, with a final, easy wave and a reminder that he was right there, seriously, any time, and Zoey spent the rest of the evening unpacking in fits and starts, distracted by the growing, undeniable awareness of exactly how thin the wall between investigation and something else entirely had become.

It was well past dark by the time she finally stood at her new bedroom window, boxes mostly unpacked around her, and looked out at the view she had — if she was being scrupulously honest with herself, which she still, mostly, refused to be — chosen this entire apartment specifically to have.

Leo's window was directly across, lit warm and gold against the darkening evening, close enough now that she could see, without straining, the shape of him moving through his own apartment — setting something down on the counter, bending to scratch Mochi behind the ears, laughing at something on his phone.

She had done it. She had gotten exactly what she'd told herself she needed: proximity, visibility, a clear line of sight for as long as this investigation required.

Standing there, forehead nearly against the cool glass, watching a man she was almost, almost certain was not a murderer move easily through his evening completely unaware he was being observed, Zoey felt something shift inside her chest — quiet, and a little frightening, and entirely unrelated to any case file she'd ever opened.

The line between detective watching a suspect and woman who simply liked looking at someone, she realized with a small, sinking feeling, had been thinner than she'd wanted to admit for a while now.

Tonight, standing in an apartment she'd rented under false pretenses for a case that no longer had any real evidence behind it, that line had finally, quietly, disappeared altogether.

She did not, of course, admit this out loud. She simply pulled the curtain half-closed, sat back down among her half-unpacked boxes, and told herself — one more time, for old times' sake — that this was still, somehow, purely professional.

Across the street, Leo glanced up at the newly lit window across from his own, smiled faintly to himself without quite knowing why, and went back to scratching his cat, blissfully unaware that he had just acquired, in every sense but the official one, a full-time surveillance detail.