Zoey did not sleep well after the closet incident. This was, by now, an established pattern — every escalation in her one-woman investigation of Leo seemed to cost her a night's sleep in direct proportion to how badly it had actually gone, and by that metric, last night should have kept her up for at least a week.

She woke early, made coffee she didn't finish, and spent a solid hour composing and deleting variations of a text that might explain, retroactively, what exactly a fire safety consultation was supposed to look like. She sent none of them. There was, she'd concluded somewhere around four in the morning, no version of that explanation that made her sound less unhinged, only different flavors of unhinged, and she'd rather leave the whole incident to fade quietly into the past than draw further attention to it.

Naturally, then, it was Leo who texted first.

hey, this is maybe a weird ask, but — since you're already doing the whole fire safety thing — would you mind actually taking a look at my smoke detector? pretty sure the battery's dying, it's been chirping since like 6am and i can't reach it without a stool i apparently don't own

Zoey read the message twice, torn between mortification and the distinct, treacherous feeling of being handed a perfectly plausible excuse to see him again.

She told herself the second feeling didn't count.

sure, give me ten minutes, she typed back, and then spent considerably longer than ten minutes deciding what to wear for what was, ostensibly, a five-minute battery replacement.

By the time she knocked on his door, stool borrowed from her own kitchen tucked under one arm, Leo answered looking exactly like a man who had, in fact, been kept awake since six by an insistent electronic chirp — hair mussed, one sock on, an expression of profound, weary gratitude that made something in Zoey's chest twist unhelpfully.

"You are a lifesaver," he said, stepping back to let her in. "Genuinely. I called the building manager, he said Thursday, and I don't think I can survive until Thursday."

"It's just a battery," Zoey said, setting up the stool beneath the offending detector, which chirped again, mournfully, as if agreeing with his assessment of the crisis. "This is not exactly advanced fire safety work."

"To you, maybe. To me, at six a.m., it felt like a personal attack." He watched her climb up, hovering slightly, the particular hovering of someone who felt obligated to look useful but had no actual task to perform. "Do you need me to hold the stool or something? I feel like I should be doing more than just standing here."

"I think I can manage a stool," Zoey said, popping the detector's cover open and squinting at the battery compartment.

"Right. Yeah. Obviously." He didn't move, exactly, but he did keep talking, in the slightly rambling way of a man filling silence because the alternative felt too quiet. "I really do appreciate this. I've had a — kind of a stressful week, so the chirping was really not what I needed on top of everything else."

Zoey paused, battery half-removed. "Stressful how?"

"Ah — work stuff, mostly." Something shifted in his voice, a careful lightness that didn't quite mask what was underneath it. "We had someone from the studio's parent company come by yesterday. Guy named Marcus, he's kind of — he used to be on our team, actually, years back, before he moved up the ladder into more of a decision-making role. He's the one who'll be weighing in on whether we get greenlit for a second season."

"That sounds like a big deal," Zoey said carefully, sliding the new battery into place.

"It is. It's — yeah." Leo ran a hand through his hair, a small, tired gesture. "He wasn't exactly warm about it, is the thing. Made some comments about the show being 'cute' but not exactly 'commercially proven,' whatever that means. Which, fine, maybe, but—" He stopped himself, laughed a little, the sound not quite reaching his eyes. "Sorry, you really don't need to hear all this over a smoke detector."

"No, it's fine," Zoey said, and found, uncomfortably, that she meant it — that some part of her, entirely separate from any notebook or case file, genuinely wanted to know what was weighing on him.

She snapped the detector's cover back into place. It chirped once more, softly, in what she hoped was a farewell rather than a continuation, and then fell silent.

"There," she said, stepping down from the stool. "Crisis averted."

"My hero," Leo said, and the smile that came with it was smaller than usual, a little worn around the edges, but real.

Zoey lingered a moment longer than the task required, glancing around the apartment out of habit more than intent — and it was in that idle glance that she noticed it: a door at the far end of the hallway, slightly ajar the last time she'd been here, now firmly shut, a small brass lock visible just below the handle.

"What's back there?" she asked, before she could stop herself, gesturing toward it.

Something in Leo's posture changed immediately — subtle, but unmistakable, a kind of quiet tension settling into his shoulders. "Just storage," he said, a beat too quickly. "Nothing exciting. Mostly boxes."

"Oh." Zoey studied his face for a second, the sudden, careful blankness of it, so different from the easy openness he'd shown all morning. "Okay."

"Anyway—" He was already moving toward the door, gently, unmistakably steering the conversation and her body both back toward the exit. "I really can't thank you enough for this. Let me at least buy you coffee sometime, as a proper thank-you, not just—" he gestured vaguely, "cake and closet emergencies."

"You don't have to," Zoey said, though the offer sent an unwelcome little flutter through her chest.

"I want to," Leo said, simply, and the warmth was back in his voice, the strange, careful tension around the locked door already smoothing over like it had never happened at all.

She left a few minutes later, stool tucked back under her arm, and made it exactly to her own front door before the part of her brain that had gone quiet all morning — the part that took notes, that built case files, that had never quite managed to stop suspecting him even when every new piece of evidence pointed the other way — sat up sharply and demanded her attention.

A locked door.

Nothing exciting, just boxes, he'd said. But no one locked a door for boxes. No one's face went that careful, that controlled, over storage.

Zoey sat down at her desk the moment she was back in her own apartment, pulled out the small black notebook, and opened it to a fresh page.

Subject has locked room in apartment, she wrote, the old, familiar rhythm of investigation settling back over her like a coat she'd almost forgotten she owned. Claims storage. Reaction to question was disproportionate to a mundane explanation — defensive, immediate change of subject. Also: subject under significant professional pressure (second season greenlight, hostile evaluator named Marcus). Possible connection between locked room and work stress? Requires further observation.

She sat back, tapping her pen against the page, and felt the old certainty return — the sense of a puzzle with pieces still missing, a mystery not yet solved.

It should have felt satisfying. Instead, underneath the investigative thrill, sat something considerably less comfortable: the memory of Leo's tired eyes that morning, the genuine exhaustion in his voice when he talked about Marcus, the way his shoulders had curled slightly inward at the mention of the word commercially proven — like he'd heard some version of that judgment before, from someone else, a long time ago, and it had never quite stopped hurting.

Whatever was behind that locked door, Zoey thought, closing the notebook, some instinct she didn't fully trust yet was already whispering that it wasn't evidence of a crime.

It was something else. Something that mattered to him in a way she was starting, against every ounce of professional detachment she'd promised herself she'd maintain, to genuinely want to understand.

She didn't write that part down. Some things, she decided, didn't belong in the case file at all.