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Most nights, he only closed his door, trusting the old latch and the house's general commitment to announcing movement before it arrived. But today he turned the lock, and the heavy click of the bolt sliding home was, for the first time since he'd moved in, a deeply useful sound.

He sat on the edge of his bed, phone in hand. The notes app was right there, waiting, patient as a priest in a confessional. He could open it. He could add the locks, the research pages, and "hallway too narrow—adjust or use kitchen instead?" to the list. It was containable evidence that fit inside the framework he'd been building since the first week.

He didn't open it.

Instead, he pulled up the casting call for After Amy.

He'd bookmarked it weeks ago. The page was still there—the moody stills that looked shot on 16mm, the brief character descriptions, the submission deadline that had been extended once and now read October 14th. Eleven days from now. Eleven days before late October. Eleven days before whatever was coming arrived.

Hakeem read the character breakdown for the third time.

COLE, mid-20s, widower. Lives alone in a house that is doing something to him. Smart enough to know something is wrong. Too lonely to leave. The horror is not the house. The horror is the version of himself the house has made visible.

He stared at that last line until the letters stopped meaning anything and then started meaning too much.

Tabbi's voice: being the best person at The Last Cue is not a career. It's a hiding place.

Layla's voice: do one thing that's about you. Not about him.

Antonio's voice, rougher, closer, arriving from a doorframe at the top of the stairs: You're disruptive.

Hakeem set his phone on the nightstand and looked around his room. The window that faced the street, letting in the late morning light in a way that was actually, annoyingly, pretty good for a self-tape. The wall that separated him from Antonio, currently silent, was holding whatever Antonio was planning on the other side of it like a secret it wasn't going to share.

He could hear Tabbi's voice again: stop rehearsing the rejection before you've given them the audition.

Hakeem stood up.

He moved the lamp to the nightstand's edge and angled it toward the wall behind his bed, creating a wash of warm light that softened the room without flattening it. He'd done enough self-tapes to know that the difference between looking like an actor and looking like a person was almost entirely about lighting. Studios wanted naturalism. Naturalism meant you looked like yourself, just slightly better lit. A version of you that existed in the same world, but with someone paying attention to the frame.

He propped his phone against the VHS stack and checked the angle. It was too high, shooting down at him, which made him look like he was being surveilled by a home security camera. He adjusted and used a paperback to change the tilt. Better. The frame caught him from the chest up, the wall behind him warm and neutral, the crooked lampshade barely visible at the edge of the shot in a way that made the room feel lived-in rather than staged.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the screen.

His face looked back at him. The cut on his lip was a thin dark line, almost invisible in the warm light. His eyes looked tired in a way that read, on camera, as depth. His jaw had a tension in it that he would normally try to release before recording. Today he left it.

He pulled up the audition sides on his phone, read them once more, then set the phone back in its position. The scene was simple. Cole, alone in a room. Talking to someone who isn't there—a voicemail, maybe, or a confession spoken into the air of an empty house. The lines were spare. The directions said no performance. Just a man saying things he's been holding for too long in a space that has been holding him.

Hakeem knew this scene. He'd been living a version of it for a month. He pressed record.

The first take was bad. His voice came out with too much stage actor in it—crisp diction, managed breath, the particular quality of someone who had been trained to project even when whispering. He stopped, deleted it, and sat for a minute.

He thought about Antonio downstairs, checking locks, writing notes, moving through the house with a confidence that suggested he had studied every room's dimensions. He thought about the manuscript pages—the character who stayed, the house that was complicit, the kitchen scene that was their kitchen scene translated into fiction with professional care. He thought about tell me to stop, the way Antonio's body had felt against his, all that careful restraint finally breaking, and how the breaking was starting to feel less like a beginning and more like seduction with a motive.

He pressed record again.

This time, he didn't perform. He talked, and said Cole's lines the way he would naturally say them. Not to an audience, or a casting director, he hoped would finally see him. He spoke to the room. To the walls of a house he was no longer sure he understood, if he ever truly had. His voice came out ragged, carrying the specific fatigue that gave away that he had not slept enough. He was wearing his heart on his sleeve, as damned as it was, and saying things out loud that he'd been chewing on in silence.

He did the scene three times. The second take was close. The third was the one.

He knew it was the one because his hands were shaking when he finished it, and his eyes felt hot. He had said a line about wanting to be seen by someone who might not be safe, and his voice had cracked on "safe" in a way he hadn't planned. The crack wasn't a technique. It was the sound of him recently discovering that the person paying the most attention to him in the world might be doing it for reasons that weren't affection, but its predatory opposite.

He stopped recording, sat on the bed, and breathed.

The room was quiet. Through the wall, silence. Through the window, the distant sound of the neighborhood doing its ordinary afternoon business. He heard a leaf blower, a car door slam, and children shrieking playfully, but the playful shrieks, heard from inside this room, sounded less like joy and more like a warning.

Hakeem picked up the phone and watched the take back.

It was good.