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Hakeem tied the apron. His fingers felt less coordinated than usual.

"Toni's good at that," he said carefully.

Layla glanced up. "At what?"

"Making you feel like staying is the same thing as wanting to be found."

The sentence came out before he had fully approved it, and the moment it existed in the air between them, he wished violently that he could retrieve it.

Layla looked at him for one long beat. Then she said, "Babe. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine. You sound like you've been personally inside a Toni Sanchez novel for the last two weeks."

Hakeem let out a sound that was technically a laugh. "That would require better lighting and worse life choices."

"Do you not already have both of those things?"

Tabbi, from across the room, said, "She has a point."

Hakeem moved through the first hour with his hands on autopilot and his thoughts somewhere else entirely. He made drinks, wiped surfaces, smiled at patrons who ordered despair-themed cocktails with complete sincerity, and silently replayed Layla's sentence until it became a bruise.

He stayed because the house made him feel seen.

Hakeem knew exactly why that was sitting wrong. He knew why the word complicit had been waiting in his mouth. He knew why Toni's method felt less like literary analysis and more like personal exposure.

He also knew, with the grim clarity of having spent the last several days updating a notes app like it was a federal investigation, that he had reached the point where feelings were no longer enough. Not hunches, not vibes, not the increasingly baroque emotional architecture he had been constructing out of birthday jokes, lingering eye contact, and a devastating man's handwriting in the dark.

He needed paper.

Real, physical, hold-it-in-your-hands paper.

By the time his shift ended, the decision had hardened into something that felt closer to an obligation than a choice. Hakeem walked to his car under the particular sodium-orange glow that Los Angeles used in place of actual warmth and told himself this was reasonable. Justified. Possibly even responsible, depending on how generously one defines the word.

Antonio's desk drawer, the one he had closed on Hakeem the night he'd caught him near the notebook. The one Antonio had shut with a quiet, factual boundary that Hakeem had been replaying for days as if the sound of the wood sliding into place was a sentence with more than one meaning.

The rest of it isn't yours.

Hakeem started the car.

The house was dark when he pulled up.

Not the kind of dark that meant anything threatening, at least not objectively—just the ordinary vacancy of an empty house at midnight. The porch light was off, which Hakeem noted primarily because Antonio usually left it on. The kitchen window showed nothing. The upstairs was still.

Antonio was gone, for however long that might be, and Hakeem felt both fear and possibility. He sat in the car for thirty seconds longer than necessary, watching the house do absolutely nothing. His phone screen showed no texts, no missed calls, no sign of Antonio.

He went inside.

The front door unlocked easily. The hallway smelled like old wood and faintly like coffee from that morning. Hakeem set his keys in the bowl and paused, listening with the attention of a man pretending he wasn’t about to do something he couldn’t undo.

He didn’t hear movement upstairs. There was no murmur of Antonio’s voice on the phone or the soft percussion of Antonio's pen against a notebook page. The house offered silence like a dare.

Hakeem slipped off his shoes and moved toward the stairs.

Antonio's room was cooler than the rest of the house, as if the air itself had been organized into better behavior.

Hakeem stood just inside the doorway and let his eyes adjust. Streetlight came through the window in a pale wash that caught the edge of the desk, the chair, and the neat stack of books on the nightstand. The bed was made. The lamp was off. Everything in the room looked like it had been placed by someone who would notice if a single object moved a quarter inch to the left.