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"Your birthday's in three weeks," Antonio said without turning around.

Hakeem's stomach dropped.

"Why do you keep bringing that up?"

Antonio paused at the base of the stairs. He glanced back. His face was unreadable—the warm, tired version from the whiskey completely gone, replaced by original Antonio, the one Hakeem had met on his first day. Controlled. Watchful. Giving away nothing he hadn't pre-approved.

"October's hard on old houses. Just making sure the house is secure before then."

Then he went upstairs.

Hakeem stood in the kitchen with the morning light coming through the window that Antonio had just tested and felt the entire previous night rearrange itself inside him. The doorframe. The kiss. "Tell me to stop." The way Antonio's hands had gripped his hip hard enough to leave a mark. All of it was still in his body, vivid and warm. Now it was sitting next to the image of the same man moving through the house, checking locks with the quiet efficiency of someone securing a perimeter.

Just making sure the house is secure before then.

Before what? Before Hakeem's twenty-seventh birthday? Before late October arrived, and whatever Antonio had been tracking on his private calendar clicked into place? Or before something practical, something ordinary, something that had nothing to do with the paranoid architecture Hakeem had been living inside for weeks?

He didn't know, and the not-knowing was worse than either answer.

Hakeem realized his hands were shaking. He put them flat on the counter and pressed down hard enough to feel the cold of the tile through his palms. He stood there until his pulse found something resembling a normal rhythm, then he started cleaning the kitchen because it was the only thing he could think to do that didn't involve screaming into the void or updating his notes app or driving back to the gas station on La Brea and sitting on the hood of his car until his twenty-seventh birthday passed without incident.

He was pulling the recycling bin out from under the sink when he saw the page.

It was folded once, tucked between a flattened cereal box and the empty bottle of the whiskey they'd shared the night before. Hakeem almost left it there, folded and half-hidden, because going through someone's recycling was arguably worse than going through their desk drawer, and he had already done that.

He pulled it out.

The page was a printout from a website, something medical or forensic, he couldn't tell which. The text was dense and clinical. The header read Biomechanics of Blunt Force Trauma in Residential Settings. Beneath it, subsections: staircase falls, impact distribution in narrow hallways, and the role of surface hardness in injury severity.

Hakeem read the first paragraph. Then read it again because his brain refused to process it on the initial pass.

The article discussed how injuries differed based on the architecture of the space where they occurred. Hallway falls versus open-room falls. The difference in impact velocity between a carpeted staircase and a hardwood one. How the width of a corridor affected the body's ability to brace. How certain surfaces—tile, hardwood, exposed brick—produced different wound patterns.

At the bottom of the page, in pencil, in Antonio's handwriting, a single note:

hallway too narrow—adjust or use kitchen instead?

Hakeem set the page on the counter.

His hands were not shaking anymore. They had gone past shaking into something steadier and worse. He was experiencing the particular stillness of a body that had received information it could not process through normal channels. He stared at the printouts. The cereal box and the whiskey bottle sat in the recycling bin beneath the sink, ordinary objects framing something that was not ordinary at all.

hallway too narrow—adjust or use kitchen instead?

He tried to make the sentence mean something ordinary. Maybe it was a renovation note, or for furniture arrangement. Some practical considerations about a house that was old enough to have opinions about its own layout.

However, the sentence sat on top of an article about how bodies broke differently depending on which room they fell in, and Hakeem could not make those two things mean something ordinary at the same time.

He thought about the locks. Every window tested, every latch checked, Antonio moving through the house with a tape measure's worth of attention while answering Hakeem's questions in a voice stripped of everything warm. The ones that don't close properly. October's hard on old houses. The birthday comment dropped over one shoulder like loose change.

He folded the page and put it back in the recycling bin, between the cereal box and the empty whiskey bottle, exactly where he'd found it. He washed his hands. He stood at the sink with warm water running over them and stared at the window Antonio had tested twenty minutes ago.

The page did not read like research. It read like homework. He thought about the character in Antonio's manuscript, the one who sounded like him, the one who stayed in a house because being watched was the closest thing he had to being known.

He thought about crab shells cracking under a blade and Antonio's voice saying the animal doesn't know what's happening at first.

He turned off the water and headed upstairs as quietly as he could.

Hakeem locked his bedroom door.