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“Thank you,” Hakeem said, deeply pleased. “I see you’re a man of taste.”

Antonio’s eyes glanced down quickly, and Hakeem briefly considered dialing down his usual charisma.

Or he could let his personality be what it was, and see what happened. That seemed far more interesting.

Antonio stepped aside. “Come in before the porch gives up.”

That was not, in Hakeem’s opinion, an ideal sentence to hear while standing on a porch. Still, he lifted his things and went in.

The inside of the house was cooler than outside, though not by much. It held heat the way old buildings did, deep in the walls. The entryway opened into a hall with dark wood floors and a staircase climbing up one side. The hallway could probably only fit one of them and a laundry basket at a time. The place smelled faintly of old plaster, dust, and something clean underneath it, like Antonio had put some effort into first impressions.

Antonio took the duffel from him before Hakeem could object.

“I can get it,” Hakeem said automatically.

“I know,” Antonio said. “I’m still taking it.”

He said it without macho insistence or performance. He turned his body toward the stairs like the matter had already been resolved, and let Hakeem pass through the threshold. He shut the front door behind them and followed Antonio upstairs, lamp tucked against his ribs, garment bag slung over his shoulder. Antonio moved through the house like somebody who knew exactly where it would betray him.

“This one screams,” he said, stepping over a section of floorboard near the base of the stairs.

“What a comforting way to describe your home.”

“The stair, too.” He put his hand briefly against the banister as he climbed. “Third one from the top sticks if you come down too fast.”

Hakeem looked at the stair in question.

Then, at Antonio, who kept going.

“The bathroom lock jams if you push it all the way in, so don’t. Back door swells in damp weather. And sound carries from the landing.”

He said it all in the same even, practical tone, but with each detail—the screaming floorboard, the jamming lock, the way sound carried—a pressure built behind Hakeem’s ribs. It was the intimacy of it, the house’s weaknesses mapped so neatly, that felt like being handed the blueprint to a trap.

“Hm,” Hakeem said.

Antonio glanced back. “That sounded skeptical.”

“I’m deciding whether this place has charm or tetanus.”

“It has both.” Antonio shrugged and kept up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, he turned down a short hall and nudged open a door with his shoulder. “This is the one.”

The room was small, but not oppressively so. One window against faded beige wallpaper decorated with small pink roses. A closet that looked like it might fit exactly three shirts and only a small sliver of Hakeem’s struggling career baggage. The hardwood floors were scratched, the baseboards chipped, and the ceiling had a hairline crack running across one corner in a way Hakeem chose, for his own peace, not to inspect too closely.

But the light in the room—even now, with the sky going deep blue outside—was good.

In daylight, it would probably come in clean and dramatic. The kind of morning light that made an ordinary person feel briefly aspirational and emotionally capable.

He shoved how much that mattered to him down, somewhere deep.

Antonio set the duffel down just inside the door.

“The window sticks a little,” he said. “You have to lift and then slide.”

“Does everything in this house come with a condition?”

“Yes.”