Chapter Four
Watching the Watcher
Senna told Imke to install a camera on the studio's outer door on a Thursday morning, framing it as a security measure in a tone flat enough that Imke didn't ask the obvious follow up question, the one about why a studio that had operated without one for two years suddenly needed it now.
"There's been some loitering on the street," Senna said, which was true in the narrowest possible sense, and Imke, to her credit, simply nodded and had a small wireless unit mounted above the door frame by that afternoon, feeding footage to an app on Senna's phone that she told herself she'd check only if something actually seemed wrong.
She checked it that night before she'd even finished her coffee.
The footage was grainy, timestamped, entirely unglamorous: Colt arriving a little after eleven, parking the bike in the same spot he'd claimed for three nights running now, settling against the wall with the particular economy of movement of a man who has learned to make himself comfortable in uncomfortable places.
He didn't check his phone. He didn't smoke, didn't pace, didn't do any of the restless things a person killing time might do.
He simply sat, occasionally shifting his weight, watching the empty street with an attention that had nowhere obvious to land, and stayed until the gray hour before dawn when he got up, stretched once, and rode away.
Senna watched four consecutive nights of it in the space of one sitting, fast forwarding through the stillness, and told herself she was gathering data, building a case, the same instinct that had her documenting everything for Baumgartner's file.
She did not examine too closely why she watched the whole thing at regular speed the second time.
There was something in the footage that unsettled her more than his presence itself, something she couldn't name until the third viewing: he never once looked up at her window.
Every angle the camera caught, every hour of grainy, poorly lit footage, showed a man looking at the street, at his own hands, at nothing in particular, but never once craning his neck toward the loft above the studio the way she would have expected from someone performing devotion for an audience.
If he was doing this to be seen, he was doing an unconvincing job of checking whether anyone was watching.
That inconsistency sat wrong in her chest, a detail that didn't fit the story she'd been telling herself about manipulation, about a man staging grief the way she'd watched a hundred actors fake sincerity over the years.
Genuine indifference to whether she was watching was either the best acting she'd ever seen, or it wasn't acting at all.
? ? ?
At the studio the next day, her attention frayed further than it had the day before.
She snapped at a voice actor over an inflection so minor she couldn't, twenty minutes later, entirely remember what had bothered her about it, and had to apologize twice in the same session, a first in the two years Klarheit Audio had been operating.
Imke caught her eye across the mixing desk after the second apology, said nothing, but flagged the moment with the small, worried attention of someone keeping a private tally.
"You don't have to run today's session if you're not up for it," Imke said quietly, once the actor had left for a break. "I can cover the notes. You could go upstairs."
"I'm fine."
"You've said that four times since Tuesday.
It's starting to sound like a line reading instead of an answer.
" Imke said it gently, without accusation, and Senna, who had spent her career catching exactly that kind of tell in other people's voices, had nothing to say to hearing it turned back on her own.
She was still turning that over, an hour later, when the studio's front door opened and a woman she didn't recognize walked in unannounced: dark hair pulled back practically, a paramedic's jacket half zipped over scrubs, an unmistakable resemblance around the jaw and the set of the shoulders that Senna clocked before the woman had said a single word.
"You're Senna," the woman said. Not a question. "I'm Sabine. Colt's sister."
Senna set down the tablet she'd been holding, aware of Imke going very still and quiet at the desk behind her, tactfully absorbed in her own screen. "I didn't know he had a sister who spoke to him."
"I mostly don't," Sabine said, unbothered by the edge in it.
"We're not close. Haven't been in years, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
But I heard what happened, and I heard what he's been doing outside your studio every night, and I wanted to tell you something in person before you decide what it means without all the information. "
"I don't need you to defend him."
"I'm not defending what he did. What he did was inexcusable and I told him so myself, to his face, three days ago.
" Sabine's voice was steady, unhurried, a professional calm that Senna recognized because she used a version of it herself, the voice of someone trained to deliver hard information clearly.
"I'm telling you that I have never, in thirty four years, seen my brother sit still for anything.
Not for our father's funeral, where he left the reception after eleven minutes because standing in one room with people's sympathy made his skin crawl.
Not for anything. Colt processes things by moving, by working, by staying busy enough that he doesn't have to feel them in real time.
Whatever this is he's doing outside your window, sitting in the cold, saying nothing, not asking you for anything, it is the single least characteristic thing I have ever known him to do.
I'm not telling you what to make of that. I'm telling you it isn't nothing."
Senna stood very still, absorbing that, a piece of information that didn't fit cleanly into either the case she was building for Baumgartner or the private, cautious hope she wasn't yet willing to name. "Why are you telling me this."
"Because somebody should, and he'd never say it about himself.
" Sabine glanced toward the door, already moving to leave, a woman clearly uncomfortable spending longer in a conversation than the information required.
"I'm not asking you to forgive him. That's not mine to ask.
I just didn't want you making a decision about what this is without knowing it's not a performance he's capable of faking.
He doesn't have the patience to fake something this quiet. "
She left as abruptly as she'd arrived, the studio door swinging shut behind her, and Senna stood in the sudden silence of the front room feeling the careful architecture of her anger take on a hairline crack it hadn't had an hour before.
"You okay?" Imke asked, once it was clear the visitor wasn't coming back.
"I don't know yet." Senna picked the tablet back up, though she made no move to actually look at it, holding it more as a prop than a tool. "That was his sister. Apparently they're estranged. She came here specifically to tell me he doesn't do things like this."
"Things like what?"
"Sit still. Wait. Not push." Senna said it slowly, testing the words against what she'd watched on four nights of camera footage, against what Greta had said on the phone about not having a category filed away for a man who says nothing.
"She said it isn't a performance because he doesn't have the patience to fake something this quiet. "
Imke considered that with the same careful neutrality she brought to every difficult conversation at the studio, neither pushing an opinion nor withholding one entirely.
"For what it's worth," she said eventually, "I've watched a lot of actors try to fake stillness in that booth.
It's the hardest thing in the world to fake convincingly.
Most people's bodies give them away within about ninety seconds.
Fidgeting, checking a phone, glancing at the door.
" She nodded toward the front window, toward the empty curb outside.
"Four nights running is a long time to hold a lie that specific. "
It wasn't advice, exactly. Senna appreciated that Imke hadn't offered any, had simply laid a piece of professional observation on the table the way she might flag a technical issue in a recording and let Senna draw her own conclusions.
But it stayed with her for the rest of the afternoon regardless, one more small weight added to a scale she was doing her best not to admit she was even holding.
? ? ?
That night, for the first time since Tuesday, Senna made herself a promise before Colt's usual hour arrived: she would not look.
She went to bed early, curtains drawn, and lay in the dark reciting, silently, the list of things she still needed to handle the following day, an old trick for keeping her mind busy enough not to wander somewhere she'd told it not to go.
It didn't work.
At two in the morning she was still awake, staring at the ceiling, aware with total, humiliating clarity of exactly how many minutes had passed since Colt's usual arrival time, and she gave up somewhere around 2:05, got up, crossed to the window without turning on a light, and looked.
He was there. Same spot, same stillness, rain having given way that night to a hard, clear cold that put frost on the parked cars along the street, and he sat against the brick with his jacket collar turned up and his breath visible in short, steady clouds, unmoving, exactly where he'd been every night that week, exactly where, some new and unwelcome part of her recognized, she had half expected and even hoped to find him.
She stood at the glass for a long time, watching a man freeze himself patiently on her behalf, and found she no longer had the energy to pretend, even to herself, that this meant nothing at all.
She thought about going down. The idea arrived fully formed and startling, and she stood with her palm against the cold windowpane turning it over: she could put on a coat, walk downstairs, unlock the door she'd had changed only days before, and simply tell him to come inside out of the cold, not as forgiveness, not as an invitation to anything, just as a basic mercy she might extend to any stranger freezing on her street.
The thought frightened her more than she expected.
It wasn't the mercy itself that scared her.
It was how easily her mind had reached for it, how little persuading it had taken, after four days of insisting to everyone including herself that nothing had changed.
She didn't go down. She made herself stand at the window instead, watching, until the cold in the room drove her back to bed, and lay awake a long time afterward turning the impulse over like a take she wasn't ready to commit to tape.