Zoey's window had, by now, become something closer to a second desk than a piece of architecture, and it was from that particular vantage point, mid-afternoon on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, that she first properly laid eyes on the man from the studio.

He arrived on foot, sharply dressed in the kind of tailored coat that looked expensive in a way that seemed almost aggressive against the casual, paint-and-clay-dusted informality of the neighborhood, and rang Leo's buzzer with the brisk, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life doubted he'd be let in.

Zoey watched, half out of habit, half because something in the man's posture — upright, assessing, faintly bored — made her instinctively reach for her notebook.

Subject received visitor, approx. 2:40pm, she wrote, settling into the old rhythm with an ease that would have concerned her if she'd stopped to examine it. Visitor: male, mid-to-late 30s, expensive coat, arrived alone. Manner suggests professional relationship, not personal. Possible associate?

She couldn't hear anything from this distance, of course, but she didn't need to. Body language told her enough. Leo opened the door with his usual easy warmth, gestured the man inside with the particular over-attentiveness of someone hosting a guest he didn't entirely want in his home, and by the time they moved into view of the living room window, Zoey could see, even without sound, that something in the conversation had already gone tense.

Leo's shoulders, usually loose and expressive when he talked, had drawn up tight. His hands, which normally moved freely when he spoke — she'd noticed this before, filed it away as one more small, distracting detail about him she had no professional reason to have catalogued — stayed mostly still, folded, careful. The other man gestured at something on the desk — one of the clay figures, Zoey thought, though she couldn't be sure from this distance — with the flat, dismissive motion of someone waving away something he considered unimportant.

Leo's jaw tightened. He said something short. The other man said something shorter, gesturing once more at the shelf of finished figures with the same careless flick of the wrist, like he was appraising inventory rather than looking at something someone had spent months of their life making by hand. Then he turned to leave without waiting for further discussion, the kind of exit that read, even from four floors up and across a busy street, as a closing statement rather than the end of a conversation.

Leo didn't walk him out. He stood where he was, arms crossed now, watching the man let himself out with the ease of someone who clearly didn't need directions.

Zoey kept writing, half out of habit, half because it gave her hands something to do besides simply watching him hurt.

Visitor departed after approx. 15 min, appeared tense/hostile in final exchange. Subject visibly affected after visitor's departure — remained motionless for several minutes. Possible power dynamic: visitor holds authority over subject's work.

She sat with the notebook open in her lap for a long time after that, pen still, watching the light shift across Leo's apartment as evening came on. He didn't move for what felt like a long time — long enough that Zoey found herself standing at the window with her hand pressed flat against the cool glass, an entirely useless gesture, as if proximity through two panes of glass and forty feet of open air could somehow reach him.

Eventually he did move, crossing to his desk, sitting down heavily in the chair, but he didn't pick up any of his tools. He simply sat there, elbows braced against the desk, staring at something Zoey couldn't quite make out — one of the figures, she thought, maybe the one the visitor had gestured at so dismissively.

His phone lit up twice on the desk beside him. He didn't touch it either time.

It was nearly nine when Zoey, restless and unable to focus on anything else, decided to step out for air — telling herself it had nothing to do with wanting to be closer to whatever was happening across the street, and knowing, even as she told herself that, that it was at least partly a lie. She was halfway down the block when she heard it: Leo's voice, low and tired, drifting from somewhere ahead on the sidewalk, phone pressed to his ear, pacing slowly in the cooling evening air.

Zoey slowed her steps without deciding to, staying just far enough back to remain unnoticed, close enough to catch fragments.

"—I understand the timeline, I do, I just think if we had until the end of the quarter instead of—" A pause, his free hand dragging back through his hair. "No, I know Marcus already made the call. I'm not trying to go around him, I just—" Another pause, longer this time, and when he spoke again, something in his voice had gone smaller, more tired than she'd ever heard it. "Yeah. No, I get it. I'll figure something out."

The call ended. He stood there a moment longer under the streetlight, phone still in hand, shoulders curved in on themselves in a way that made him look, for the first time since Zoey had known him, considerably smaller than he actually was. Then, with the particular effort of someone forcing themselves back into a functional shape, he straightened, pocketed the phone, and turned toward home.

Zoey ducked into the recessed doorway of a closed shop before he could see her, heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with concealment technique and everything to do with the look that had been on his face a moment ago.

She waited until his footsteps had passed, then several minutes more, before she let herself walk home.

Back in her apartment, she sat at her desk with the notebook open in front of her, pen in hand, and found she couldn't write anything at all.

There was, she realized, something uncomfortable happening to her theory of the case — not because the evidence was disappearing, exactly, but because every new piece of it kept refusing to point where she needed it to. A tense visitor. A locked door. A man under obvious, mounting pressure from someone with power over his work, someone who could apparently, with a single dismissive gesture at a shelf of handmade figures, take away something that clearly mattered to him more than almost anything else.

It should have felt like the pieces of a puzzle clicking together, evidence accumulating toward whatever dark conclusion she'd built her entire relocation around.

Instead, all she could think about was the exhaustion in his voice on that phone call, the particular defeated slump of his shoulders in the empty apartment, the same look, she thought suddenly, unbidden, that she probably wore herself on her worst deadline nights — staring at a blank document, wondering if she was ever going to be good enough at the one thing she'd built her whole identity around, bracing for someone else's verdict on whether her work mattered at all.

She didn't want to feel this. It was inconvenient, and worse than inconvenient — it was the exact kind of empathy that made for a terrible investigator, the sort of soft-heartedness that got fictional detectives killed in the second act of every book she'd ever written. A good detective kept her distance. A good detective didn't lie awake wondering whether the man she was investigating had eaten dinner, or whether someone had said something kind to him tonight, or whether he was, right now, sitting alone across the street replaying a stranger's careless dismissal of his life's work.

And yet.

She found herself, against every professional instinct she'd tried to cultivate all week, hoping — quietly, uselessly, from her own dark apartment across a quiet street — that whatever Marcus had said to him, Leo would be all right. That whatever was behind that locked door, whatever he was protecting so carefully, would still feel like it meant something to him tomorrow morning, regardless of what any man in an expensive coat thought about its commercial value.

She told herself this was purely because an unstable subject was harder to read accurately.

She picked up her phone once, thumb hovering over his contact, some half-formed impulse to send something — are you okay, or saw you looked stressed today, or anything at all that might close the distance between her window and his — and then set it back down without sending anything, because she had no good explanation for how she'd know to ask, and because some small, honest part of her was terrified of what it would mean if he asked her why she cared.

She did not, even for a second, believe her own explanation about professional detachment.

Across the street, Leo let himself back into his apartment, glanced without really seeing at the shelf of figures Marcus had waved off so easily, and sat down again at his desk in the dark, not yet ready to turn the lights back on.