By her fourth day in the new apartment, Zoey had developed what she privately referred to as a research schedule, and what any objective observer would have immediately identified as a stalking routine with better lighting.

Mornings, she wrote — or attempted to, laptop open, blinking cursor mocking her from an otherwise blank document — with one eye perpetually drifting toward the window, where Leo's apartment sat quiet and curtained until roughly nine, when he'd emerge into his kitchen looking rumpled and squint into the light like a man who had never once in his life successfully set an alarm. Afternoons, when the light through his window turned workshop-gold, she'd catch glimpses of him bent over his desk, hands moving with a precision that seemed at odds with how loosely he held everything else about himself. Evenings, she told herself she wasn't watching at all, and then watched anyway, until the light across the street clicked off and she realized she'd spent forty-five minutes staring at nothing.

She had a name for this. She called it field research. She did not examine the fact that field research, historically, involved slightly more note-taking on murder and slightly less note-taking on the specific way a man's forearms looked when he rolled his sleeves up to work.

It was Thursday afternoon, mid-field-research, when someone scratched at her door.

Not knocked. Scratched — a low, insistent sound at ankle height, accompanied by a soft, plaintive meow that Zoey recognized immediately, with a small jolt of alarm, as belonging to a cat she'd last seen sleeping on her own lap in a stranger's closet.

She opened the door with the caution of a woman expecting either a delivery or an ambush, and found, instead, Mochi — sitting primly on her welcome mat, tail curled neatly around his paws, staring up at her with the calm, unbothered confidence of a cat who had made a decision and fully expected the universe to accommodate it.

"How," Zoey said, out loud, to the empty hallway, "did you even get out here."

Mochi did not answer this, on account of being a cat, but he did stand, stretch with theatrical slowness, and stroll directly past her into the apartment as though he owned the place and had simply been delayed in claiming it.

Zoey stood in the doorway for a long moment, weighing her options. The responsible thing, obviously, was to immediately return the cat to his rightful owner — a brief, uncomplicated transaction that required no further investigation on her part.

The less responsible, considerably more interesting option was currently curling itself into a loaf on her sofa cushion like it had lived there for years.

"This is," she informed the cat, closing the door slowly behind her, "an excellent opportunity for observation."

She fed him, first — a small dish of leftover chicken, because it seemed rude not to, and also because a hungry cat seemed like a less reliable source of intelligence than a well-fed one — and then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the sofa with her phone raised, snapping a few photos of him mid-loaf with the serious, documentary intensity of a woman building a file.

Evidence, she told herself, though evidence of what, exactly, she couldn't have said with any precision. Mochi, for his part, blinked at the camera with total indifference, then rolled onto his back, exposing a soft, round belly that seemed engineered specifically to disarm anyone attempting to remain professionally detached.

Zoey, against every instinct honed over six years of writing hardened, suspicious protagonists, reached out and scratched it anyway.

Mochi began to purr, loud and immediate, and climbed, without any hesitation whatsoever, directly into her lap, turning twice before settling into a warm, heavy, entirely too comfortable weight against her thighs.

"You," Zoey told him, "have terrible judgment in humans to trust."

She was still there twenty minutes later, laptop forgotten, one hand idly scratching behind Mochi's ears while he purred like a small, contented engine, when a knock came at her door — quick, familiar, slightly out of breath.

"Hey, sorry to bother you—" Leo stood in the hallway, hair disheveled, phone still in hand like he'd been mid-search, relief visibly flooding his face the second his eyes landed past her shoulder. "Oh, thank god. He does this sometimes, finds some gap I haven't noticed and just—" He stopped, taking in the actual scene properly: his cat, fully melted into Zoey's lap, purring with the deep, self-satisfied contentment of an animal who had found exactly the spot he'd been looking for. "Wow. Okay. He never does that."

"Does what?"

"Just — likes people that fast. He usually takes weeks to warm up to anyone. My last landlord tried for eight months and Mochi still hisses at him on sight." Leo leaned against her doorframe, grinning, the earlier panic already melting into something warmer, more amused. "He's got taste, apparently."

"Or extremely low standards," Zoey said, and did not examine why her chest did something small and pleased at the comment.

"I'll take him back, sorry again—" Leo crossed the room, crouched to gather his cat with the easy, practiced motion of someone who'd done this a hundred times, and Mochi made a small, betrayed noise of protest at being relocated from a perfectly good lap. "Traitor," Leo told him fondly, tucking him against his chest, and Mochi immediately began purring again, apparently equally content with either arrangement, which struck Zoey as the single most reasonable position anyone in this entire situation had taken.

"Thanks for feeding him, by the way," Leo added, pausing at the door. "You didn't have to do that."

"He looked hungry."

"He always looks hungry. It's a personality trait, not a medical condition." He smiled at her, easy and warm, the kind of smile that made the careful, suspicious part of Zoey's brain go strangely, uncooperatively quiet. "Anyway — thanks. Seriously."

He left with a small wave, Mochi's tail flicking a lazy goodbye over his shoulder, and Zoey closed the door behind him, standing there for a moment in the sudden quiet of her apartment, one hand still faintly warm from where the cat had been.

She sat back down at her desk. She reached, out of habit more than anything, for a blank notebook she'd bought specifically for this purpose — small, black, unremarkable, the kind of notebook that wouldn't draw attention if anyone ever saw it lying around — and opened it to the first page.

She uncapped her pen.

Subject displays anomalous behavior, she wrote, in the deliberate, professional handwriting she reserved for anything she wanted to feel official. Cat exhibited immediate trust, contrary to established pattern (per subject's own testimony). Possible explanation: subject's residence and personal effects consistent with someone genuinely warm and safe, rather than dangerous. Note: subject's smile when discussing cat's behavior was —

She stopped.

She read back what she'd written.

Subject's smile, the sentence continued, unbidden, in her own handwriting, was unusually —

She stared at the page for a long moment, pen hovering, the sentence trailing off into nothing because she had, apparently, no professional or investigative reason whatsoever to have started writing about the specific quality of Leo's smile in a notebook that was supposed to contain evidence of criminal behavior.

"Oh, come on," she muttered, and drew a single decisive line through the sentence, hard enough that the pen nearly tore the page.

She flipped to look at what she'd crossed out. Subject's smile was unusually — the rest illegible now, buried under ink, but she could still remember, with unhelpful clarity, the word she'd been about to write.

Unusually nice.

Not sinister. Not calculated. Not any of the words a woman genuinely investigating a suspected killer ought to be reaching for.

Nice.

She closed the notebook a little too firmly, set it in the drawer of her desk, and told herself, in the increasingly unconvincing internal voice she'd been using all week, that this was simply an off day. A momentary lapse. Tomorrow, she would return to proper, professional observation, unclouded by anything so embarrassingly soft as nice.

She did not, in that moment, look back across the street at the lit window where Leo had just set his cat down on the counter and was now saying something to him — mouth moving, inaudible through the glass — that made the cat's tail flick lazily, contentedly, in response.

She looked anyway, eventually, twenty minutes later, when she told herself she was simply closing the curtains for the night.

She left them open instead, just slightly, just enough, and did not examine that decision either.