Page 57

That made it worse.

A bad writer using his life as material would have been easier to dismiss—invasive but clumsy, a trespass he could be angry about without complication. This was a different kind of trespass, and it held the weight of possibility. Of becoming something larger than Hakeem knew how to hold. The character on the page was not reduced or caricatured. He was rendered with a specificity that suggested the writer had been paying a kind of attention Hakeem did not know how to classify as either violation or care.

He looked down at the page again and saw a sentence about a man who catalogued every way someone could hurt him and mistook the list for a reason to stay, and every other thought in his head caught fire.

Hakeem put the pages back in the drawer and, with forced effort, steadied his hands.

He rearranged the legal pad, the envelope, and the clipped email. He closed the drawer with both hands, pressing it flush until the wood clicked softly into place. He checked the desk surface. The mug, the pen, the face down pages, the architecture book. Everything where it had been. He was almost sure.

He stepped back from the desk. He looked at the room the way Antonio would look at it—the way a man who noticed quarter-inch displacements would look at it—and felt the first cold thread of doubt about whether he had left it exactly right.

Too late. He heard the front door open downstairs.

Hakeem moved.

He was out of Antonio's room and three steps down the hallway before the sound of keys hitting the bowl reached him. His socks on the old hardwood made almost no sound, which he noted with the grim satisfaction of a man whose survival instincts had finally decided to cooperate with his bad decisions.

He made it to his own room, shut the door with a controlled click, and pressed his back against it.

His breathing was louder than he wanted. His hands felt like they belonged to someone who had recently committed a minor felony. He stood in the dark and listened to Antonio move through the house below him.

Cabinet opening. Water running. Footsteps—unhurried and even—moving from the kitchen toward the stairs.

Hakeem crossed to his bed, sat down, and pulled out his phone. He opened the notes app with the speed of a man establishing an alibi and stared at the screen with what he hoped was the posture of someone who had been sitting there for a while.

Antonio's footsteps came up the stairs. Passed the landing. Continued down the hall.

Paused.

Hakeem stopped breathing.

The pause lasted maybe three seconds, but it felt like a season. Hakeem couldn't tell if Antonio had stopped outside his door or his own. The hallway offered no clarification. The house, for once, was not announcing anything.

Then the footsteps resumed. Antonio's door opened and closed.

Hakeem exhaled.

He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, phone in hand, screen dimming and relighting as he failed to do anything with it besides click the volume button on and off. His heart was still running at a tempo that suggested his body had not yet accepted that the crisis was over.

Through the wall, he heard Antonio's desk chair scrape faintly against the floor. Then, after a beat, a stiff drawer sliding open.

Hakeem's stomach dropped.

He couldn't hear what happened next. He didn't know if Antonio was checking the contents or simply retrieving something. He didn't know if the manuscript pages were in exactly the right order, or if the clipped email had been placed at precisely the same angle, or if the legal pad's top page still showed the same line Antonio had left visible. He didn't know if Antonio was the kind of person who left invisible markers—a pen placed just so, a page turned to a specific corner—designed to reveal whether someone had been there.

He suspected, with growing certainty, that Antonio was exactly that kind of person.

Hakeem waited another minute. Then he unlocked his phone for real and opened the notes app. The list was still there, every item still carrying the specificity of a man who had been building a case out of instinct and eye contact and the way his housemate’s voice dropped when he said his name.

He scrolled to the bottom and started typing.

— Antonio is a writer. Editorial correspondence, manuscript in revision

He paused. Then added:

— manuscript describes this house. The kitchen. The window. A character who sounds like me.

He looked at that line. Then: