Chapter 2
The Last Door smelled like fog juice and fresh paint, which was my favorite smell in the world even though it had probably taken years off my lungs.
I stood in the middle of the lobby with a clipboard I wasn’t using and watched Dani Brooks argue with a delivery guy about where exactly a crate of Victorian-looking luggage was supposed to go.
Dani had run operations for me since month four, back when The Last Door was one room and a dream and a business loan that still gave me heart palpitations.
She was taller than me by half a foot, favored bright earrings against otherwise buttoned-up work clothes, and had never once in three years let me talk her into a bad decision without at least making me say it out loud first.
“Storage room two,” she told the delivery guy, pointing with the kind of finality that ended arguments. “Not the green room. We use the green room.”
He hauled the crate off, muttering, and Dani turned to me with the look she saved for when she already suspected I was about to ruin her afternoon.
“You’ve got the face,” she said.
“What face?”
“The face you get right before you tell me something that’s going to become my problem.”
I set the clipboard down on the counter because I clearly wasn’t fooling anyone with it. “There’s been a van,” I said, “parked on Rover Street. And before the van, a sedan. And before the sedan, a gray pickup. Three days, three different vehicles, same fifteen feet of curb every time.”
Dani went still, doing arithmetic in her head. “Different days?”
“Three different days. Same angle into the courtyard, more or less, if I’m remembering the pickup right.
” I’d gone back and checked, actually, standing at my own kitchen window at an hour I should have been asleep, tracing the sightline in my head like it was one of my own puzzle rooms. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d notice unless you already knew to look for a pattern. ”
“But you noticed.”
“I design rooms where people have to notice a candlestick is six inches to the left of where it was an hour ago. Pattern recognition is sort of my whole deal.”
Dani leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and I watched her do the math out loud the way she always did, methodical, unhurried, the same way she’d once talked a panicking bachelorette party out of a supply closet during a power outage.
“Could be a contractor. Could be someone’s kid learning to parallel park in the same spot because it’s easy. Could be nothing.”
“Could be,” I agreed. “Or it could be somebody watching the building, rotating vehicles on purpose so no single one looks parked too long. I’d rather find that out on purpose than by accident.”
“So what’s the plan? Please tell me the plan doesn’t start with you walking up and knocking on the window.”
“The plan starts today, actually, and it’s going to be extremely educational.”
I’d thought about it most of the night, turning it over the way I turned over a room design before I trusted it to hold up under a paying group.
If someone really was watching the courtyard, then the watching had a target, and if the target was me, I wanted proof before I let myself feel however I was supposed to feel about that.
If it wasn’t me, I wanted to know that too.
So I changed my route home. Small thing.
Instead of cutting through the courtyard gate the way I did every single day, habit worn into muscle memory, I went around the long way, past the mailboxes and the side hedge, adding maybe ninety seconds to the walk.
If someone was tracking my patterns, a broken pattern would tell me something.
Either they’d adjust, which meant they were paying real attention, or they wouldn’t notice at all, which meant I was an idiot standing in a hedge for no reason.
Then, because I am who I am, I carried the prop mannequin head from The Night Train’s evidence table the entire way, cradled against my hip like a baby, because if anyone was filming me from a parked car I wanted them to have to explain that footage someday.
Laughing at it kept my shoulders loose as I walked, which mattered more than I wanted to admit.
Dani had insisted, before I left the shop, that this counted as a documented decision and not a bit.
“Write down the times,” she said, sliding a legal pad across the counter at me like she was dealing cards.
“Every vehicle, every day, what it looked like, when it showed up, when it left if you catch that too. If this turns into an actual problem, you want something on paper before it does, not after.”
“You think I should call the police?”
“I think if the pattern gets weirder, or closer, or if anyone ever approaches you, you call them that same day, not after you’ve turned it into a bit for your Instagram story.
” She said it lightly, but her eyes weren’t light at all.
“Also. Does Rosa know? If someone’s watching the building and not just you specifically, your downstairs neighbor should hear it from you before she hears it secondhand. ”
“I’ll tell her tonight.”
“And lock the gate behind you. Actually latch it, not the half-latch you do when your hands are full.”
“Noted. Logged. I promise.”
The van was gone by the time I made it home that evening, which didn’t surprise me, since the pattern I’d noticed had never repeated a vehicle two days running.
What was new, what actually made my stomach twist somewhere between curious and cold, was the empty stretch of curb sitting there like a held breath.
I stood on the sidewalk with the mannequin head still under my arm and stared directly at that empty parking space for a full ten seconds, the way you’d stare at a blank spot on a wall where a picture used to hang, and I let my face do exactly what it wanted to do, which was nothing subtle at all.
A tan sedan, the same one from two days before as far as I could tell, turned onto the street four minutes later and eased into that same stretch of curb like it had been poured into a mold shaped for it.
I logged it standing right there, propping the legal pad against the mannequin’s forehead because it was the only flat surface available.
Tan sedan, back again. Texas plate I couldn’t read from that distance without looking like I was trying, which I absolutely was trying.
Six eleven p.m. Same fifteen feet of curb, same angle, and if I lined up the invisible geometry the way I lined up laser sensors in the train car room, that sightline ran clean into the courtyard and up toward the second-floor east stairwell.
Toward my building. Toward, if I was being honest with the part of my brain that did the math instead of the jokes, my window.
I didn’t linger on the sidewalk with my back to the street. I moved toward the gate while I thought, mannequin head under one arm, legal pad under the other, and latched it all the way behind me.
So before I ducked through, I lifted my free hand and waved at the tan sedan the way you’d wave at a neighbor pulling into their driveway. Friendly. Unbothered. A little too enthusiastic, honestly, the kind of wave that says I see you and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Nothing happened. No wave back. No brake lights, no adjustment, no visible flinch behind the windshield glass, which from this distance gave back nothing but a flat gray reflection of the evening sky.
It didn’t prove anything, not really. A stranger ignoring a stranger’s wave was hardly evidence of a trained watcher; it might just as easily be someone embarrassed, or checking their phone, or simply not looking at the sidewalk at all.
But it made the easy explanations harder to hold onto, and that alone was worth something.
I latched the gate all the way behind me, heard the bolt catch, and made a mental note to text Dani the second I was inside with the door locked, and to call Rosa before I let myself sit down.