Page 49

Hakeem had no intention of answering that honestly. The honest answer sounded too much like a confession.

He looked away again, down the crooked hallway, toward the stairs. “I mean, you keep saying things like you know what effect they’re having.”

Antonio’s face quieted.

Then he said, more softly, “And what effect is that?”

Hakeem’s throat went dry.

This was a trap. Maybe not a conscious one, or even a malicious one, but a trap all the same. He could feel it with the same certainty he felt a drop in temperature before a jump scare: answer wrong and the whole scene changes.

He gave a brittle shrug. “Making people lower their guard.”

Antonio was quiet for one beat. Two. Then he chuckled in a way that didn’t exactly relax Hakeem. The laugh was sardonic, and Hakeem had the awful feeling of not being sure if Antonio was laughing at him.

“That sounds useful,” Antonio replied.

The answer hit Hakeem like a splash of cold water. Not unfair, or untrue.

Useful.

Antonio took another sip from his mug, then added, “Goodnight, Hakeem,” and stepped back into his room.

His door stayed open with the light on. He left Hakeem standing in the hallway regretting his choice of vocabulary. Did I show my hand? he thought, panic arriving like a gust of quick, bitter wind.

Hakeem went downstairs for water anyway, because backing out now would have felt obvious, and he didn’t want to appear more affected than he already knew he looked.

By the time he came back up, Antonio’s door was mostly shut, and the strip of light at the bottom had gone thin.

In his room, Hakeem sat on the edge of his bed and reopened the note. He added, with furious thumbs:

— very good at making things feel normal after being weird

— writes down what I say

— possibly uses humor to redirect

— possibly uses charm to disarm

He looked at that last line for a long time.

It felt melodramatic, but also, in some dark little instinctive chamber of him, correct.

Antonio did not act like a man trying to frighten him away from the truth. He acted like a man who could make Hakeem forget to look for it in the first place. If that was intentional, it was far more dangerous than bad jokes and suspicious notebooks.

He lasted maybe twelve minutes in bed before his own body became unbearable company.

The house had gone quiet. Hakeem lay on his back staring at the ceiling fan and replaying the hallway exchange until it started to feel less like a conversation and more like a small personal haunting.

Possibly uses charm to disarm.

He had written it down because it sounded dramatic enough to be useful. In his bed, in the dark, it sounded worse.

Maybe Hakeem was simply weak in the face of a certain type of voice and a certain type of eye contact and a certain type of man leaning in a doorway with a mug like he had been designed in a lab to test Hakeem’s judgment. Maybe Antonio wasn’t doing anything intentionally.

Or maybe that was exactly what made it effective.

A person did not have to be obvious to be dangerous. In fact, being obvious would have been easier. Obvious would have let Hakeem stay cleanly afraid.