Chapter Fifteen: Sneaky movements

Asha woke up at eight-thirteen to her phone buzzing against the nightstand.

She reached for it without opening her eyes, thumb already moving toward the alarm before she was fully conscious. But it wasn't her alarm. It was a notification from the building's security app, the one the landlord had installed six months ago after someone's bike went missing from the lobby.

She'd never gotten a notification from it before.

She lay there blinking at the ceiling, sleep still heavy in her limbs. The warmth in her chest was there the way it always was now, steady and present, the one constant she'd woken up to every morning since Thursday even though Thursday felt like it had happened in a different version of her life.

She opened the notification.

'Motion detected. Front lobby. 2:04 AM.'

She almost closed it. Two in the morning was when people came home from late shifts, when neighbors stumbled in after last call. It was probably nothing.

She pressed play anyway.

The footage was grainy, the timestamp burning white in the corner, the lobby rendered in that flat grey that cheap security cameras produced regardless of actual lighting. She watched the front door open. A figure stepped inside. Male, broad through the shoulders, moving with an unhurried deliberateness that made her sit up slightly.

He didn't go to the elevator. Didn't check his phone or dig through a bag. He just stopped. Turned toward the mailboxes along the left wall, the row of small brass slots with resident names beside the apartment numbers.

He stood there for eleven seconds. She counted.

Then he turned and walked back out.

She watched it again. Then a third time.

She set her phone face down on the nightstand and sat on the edge of her bed with both hands wrapped around nothing.

Someone checking an address. A wrong building. Completely ordinary. Completely explainable.

The warmth in her chest pulsed once, slow and low.

She got up. Made coffee. Stood at the counter with her textbook open to the same chapter she'd been trying to finish for three days. Read the same paragraph twice. Gave up.

The apartment felt different this morning and she couldn't locate exactly why. Same walls. Same light coming through the curtains. Same everything.

She kept coming back to those eleven seconds.

Lost people looked around. They frowned at door numbers, checked their phones, did something that looked like confusion. He hadn't been confused at all. He'd known exactly what he was looking for, found it, and left. Clean. Quiet. Under two minutes.

She poured her coffee and took it to the couch and opened the footage one more time, pausing on the clearest frame she could find. Too grainy for a face. Just a figure. Dark jacket. That stillness that her body apparently found more disturbing than anything louder would have been.

She thought about Ronan sitting across from her in that booth.

'You're what he found.'

She thought about the warmth spiking sharp in her chest last night, that displaced feeling that had kept her on the kitchen floor until nearly two in the morning.

Two in the morning.

She put her phone down carefully on the cushion beside her and sat very still for a moment.

It was a coincidence.

It had to be.

She picked up her coffee. Took a sip. Looked at the window.

The curtains were open the way she always left them on weekend mornings, grey October light filtering through the thin fabric, the street below partially visible. She never closed them during the day. Fourth floor, nobody could see in, and the natural light was the only thing that kept the apartment from feeling like the box it actually was.

She looked at the window and felt it then, moving across the back of her neck and down her arms before she'd fully registered what it was. That specific prickling awareness. The feeling of existing in a space that someone else was also paying attention to.

She crossed the room slowly.

Stood at the edge of the window and looked down at the street below without putting herself fully in view, that habit you developed without noticing when you'd lived alone long enough.

A figure stood on the pavement directly across the street.

Still. Hands in pockets.

Looking up.

Looking directly at her window.

Asha stepped back from the glass. Her heart was going faster than it should have been. She reached out and took the curtain in her hand and pulled it across the window in one slow deliberate motion until the morning light disappeared completely and the room went dim around her.

She stood with her hand still on the fabric. Her eyes didn't leave their direction. She watched them through the small space left in between the curtains.

Neither of them moved.