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"I recommended a book. I didn't ask you to read the ending during your shift."

Hakeem watched Layla lift the paperback and look at the back cover with the reverence of someone who had been personally victimized by prose. He felt the pull of it immediately. Having read Mercy House twice, he remembered exactly what the ending did and how long it had taken him to stop thinking about the hallway.

"So?" he said, because the alternative was pretending he had the capacity for this right now. This shift could be a distraction from… last night.

Layla looked up at him. Her face changed.

"Hakeem."

"What?"

"That book."

"I know."

"That book."

He let out a slow breath through his nose. "Yeah."

She pressed the novel against her chest. "The thing Toni does with the house at the end. Where it stops being a setting and becomes—I don't even know how to—" She broke off and made a frustrated gesture with one hand, as though physically trying to shape the sentence that was not arriving.

"Complicit," Hakeem offered quietly.

Layla stared at him. "Yes. That. How did you just have that ready?"

Because he had said a version of that sentence internally with no one with whom to process it, and then moved in with a man who seemed to understand houses the same way Toni did. Because the word had been sitting in the back of his mouth for days, tasting less like a review and more like something private.

He shrugged. "I told you. I've read some."

"You've read some." Layla's expression shifted into the particular look she reserved for moments when Hakeem was being transparently evasive, and she was deciding how much to enjoy it. "You said complicit like you've been journaling about it."

"I do not journal."

"You have a notes app full of feelings. That's journaling."

Hakeem felt a flash of heat climb his neck because, unfortunately, that was true, and the notes app in question currently contained a list that would require significant context to explain to anyone, including himself.

Tabbi set the menus down behind the register. "Tell her about the hallway scene."

Hakeem shot her a look. "I don't need to tell her about the hallway scene."

Layla leaned forward. "The hallway scene?"

"It's—" He stopped. "It's well-paced."

"That is the least you've ever said about anything."

Hakeem pulled his apron from beneath the bar and started tying it with more focus than the task required. "I've already given my full review. I'm not doing a sequel."

Layla watched him with the quiet, lethal patience of a woman who knew she would get more out of him eventually and was simply deciding when to collect. She looked back down at the book.

"The part that ruined me," she said, softer now, "was that the main character knew something was wrong with the house the whole time. He knew. But he stayed because the house made him feel seen. Like being watched was the closest thing he had to being known."

Hakeem's hands stilled on the apron strings.

The bar noise kept going around him. Ice in a shaker. Somebody laughing too loudly near the front. The low, steady thrum of the playlist Tabbi had built for early-shift atmosphere. But inside his chest, something had gone still and utterly attentive.

Layla wasn't looking at him anymore. She was looking at the book like it owed her an explanation.