"Cade."
"I said no."
"You refused rotation, you've been on-site for over a week, and someone walked through your security perimeter like it was a suggestion. So I'll ask once more."
My thumb presses hard enough against the phone to whiten the nail bed. "I'm doing my job."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer I've got."
Silence. Then: "I'm sending you what Evie pulled. Check your email. And Cade — if the answer changes, I need to hear it from you before I figure it out myself."
Evie's email arrives while I'm standing in the cold backyard staring at camera angles I've already verified. Subject line: Halcyon Ridge — Novak.
Gus Novak. Project manager, assigned to the Foxglove block acquisition a few years ago. Before him, Halcyon Ridge used rotating attorneys through Prescott & Yates. After Novak — after someone decided the block wasn't moving fast enough — the tactics changed. More aggressive offers. Code violations materializing from nowhere. The notes to Kari started.
"Mid-level," Evie writes. "Not the principal. Someone told him to make it happen and he took the mandate literally. He's a problem-solver who doesn't know when the problem-solving becomes criminal. That makes him more dangerous than a professional — he's improvising."
Gus Novak. Not a mastermind. Not muscle. A mid-level project manager who decided that stalking a woman out of her home qualified as due diligence.
Morning light hits the kitchen in pale stripes. Kari is already up — cinnamon and butter, which means stress-baking. Snickerdoodles, her third batch this week.
She's at the counter with her back to me, rolling dough between her palms with the precision that means she's thinking hard.
"Morning," she says without turning.
"Morning."
"Coffee's on the counter. Nina brought over a bag of her single-origin whatever yesterday while you were having your daily staring contest with the backyard."
"I was checking the perimeter."
"You were brooding attractively near the fence line. Nina's words, not mine."
The coffee is strong enough to strip paint. I take the first sip by the window, eyes tracking the street by habit.
My phone buzzes. A text — an image file.
A scan of a handwritten note. Block capitals on cheap notebook paper.
SHE BAKES EVERY MORNING. BANANA BREAD. COOKIES. MUFFINS. STARTS BEFORE LIGHT. SHE TALKS TO THE WALLS LIKE THEY CAN HEAR HER.
My hand tightens around the phone.
She talks to the walls like they can hear her. Not something you'd know from watching through a window. That's a detail you only learn by being close enough to hear — by pressing your ear to a gap in the clapboard, by finding a way into the bones of this house I still haven't mapped.
"Liam?" Kari's voice, behind me. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where your jaw goes tight and you need to inspect something outside." She's turned from the counter, dough still in one flour-dusted hand. Her eyes read something in mine that makes her set it down. "What happened?"
"New threat. The person watching you knows your baking schedule. Knows when you start work. Knows you talk to the house."
Kari goes still. Not dramatic shock — the quiet, internal stillness of someone absorbing a blow they've been bracing for. Her thumb finds her teeth. Taps once.
"They've been inside," she says.
