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yeah

LAYLA:

you're not crazy. even if you're wrong about the scary stuff. you're not crazy for noticing things that felt wrong.

He read that last text three times.

HAKEEM:

thank u <3

LAYLA:

don't thank me. survive. dont make me avenge u. *then* thank me.

HAKEEM:

you're so dramatic

LAYLA:

i learned it from you bitch !

He locked the phone and set it on the bed. His hands were trembling again, a recurring feature of his evenings in this house. Through the wall, he could hear Antonio moving in the soft percussion of someone existing in a room with purpose. The sounds that had once seemed ominous now seemed questionably ordinary. Ordinary was somehow worse, because it meant Hakeem was about to walk into a normal room and say abnormal things to a man who might respond with anything from confusion to fury.

He picked up his phone one more time and opened the notes app.

The list filled the screen. Every item, bullet point, and late-night addition. He scrolled through it slowly, not to review the evidence but to feel the weight of it. Weeks of watching and wondering and documenting, compressed into a list that looked, depending on the light, either like a case file or a love letter written in the language of fear.

He locked the phone and went downstairs.

Antonio had moved to the front room.

He was sitting on the couch with the lamp on and a book open in his lap, glasses perched on his nose in the way that made him look both more approachable and more capable of ruining Hakeem's life. He looked up when Hakeem appeared in the doorway, and his expression shifted into its usual assessment—a quick, full-body scan disguised as a glance, taking in Hakeem's posture, his face, the tension in his shoulders, and filing all of it somewhere behind the composure.

"Hey," Antonio said.

Hakeem stood in the doorway. His mouth was dry. His heart was doing something arrhythmic and unhelpful. He’d rehearsed this upstairs. His opening line was ready, the sequence and tone memorized. He had planned to be calm and methodical. Controlled and unaffected, like Antonio always appeared to be. He wanted to embody the presence of a detective presenting evidence in a procedural, not someone who had been slowly losing his mind while developing feelings for the primary suspect.

"I need to talk to you," Hakeem said.

Antonio closed the book with deliberate care, recognizing the shift in atmosphere and choosing to meet it. He set the book on the cushion beside him and looked at Hakeem.

"Okay," he said.

Hakeem crossed the room but didn't sit. Sitting felt like surrendering the advantage of height, which was the only advantage he currently possessed. He stood near the armchair with his arms folded, then unfolded them because folded arms looked defensive, then didn't know what to do with his hands, so he put them in his pockets, which was worse.

"This is going to sound insane," he said.

"Most things do before you say them out loud."

"This one will sound insane after, too."

Antonio waited. He held himself with stillness that signaled he understood silence could be a form of generosity. Hakeem resented it because it was precisely the quality that had made him suspicious in the first place—the patience, the watchfulness, the way Antonio could make not-speaking feel like the loudest thing in the room.

Hakeem took a breath.

"The first night I moved in," he said, "I saw a page in your notebook. You'd left it open on the kitchen table. It had… fragments. Things about the house. The hallway, the floorboards, something about visibility and sound. It read like someone had been studying the layout. Like planning."