Mine To Watch

Chapter Two:What He Carries

Nora sat on her kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet, the photo flat on her knee, staring at her own sleeping face like it belonged to a stranger.

She didn't sleep, and she didn't try to.

By six a.m. she had her phone in her hand and Delphine's name already dialed, a wall of frantic text sent before the call even connected.

I think it's him.

Delphine picked up on the second ring, like she'd been sitting awake waiting for exactly this. "Do not go over there alone."

"I have to give him his jacket back eventually."

"Nora, I swear to God—"

"I'm not going to accuse him. I just want to watch his face when I hand it to him." She was already pulling a sweater over her head, phone wedged against her shoulder. "See if he panics."

"Then I'm staying on the line. The whole time. Phone in your pocket, line open, and if I don't like what I hear I'm calling someone."

"Fine."

"I mean it, Nora."

"I said fine."

Julian opened his door already dressed, hair damp, like he'd just showered off a night he had no intention of explaining. Whatever he saw in her face made something behind his eyes go very still.

"You didn't have to bring that by," he said. "I could've grabbed it later."

"You left it." She held the jacket out, watching his hands more than his words. "There's something in the pocket you might want."

He didn't flinch. That was the part that undid her — no scramble, no guilty stumble, nothing she could have pointed to and said there, that's the lie.

He just reached into the inside pocket, drew out the folded photo, and looked at it for a long, quiet second before lifting his eyes to hers.

"You went through my jacket."

"It fell open. I wasn't looking for anything."

A lie, small and immediate, and she didn't care. "Julian. That's a photo of me sleeping. In my old apartment. Taken through the window."

"I know what it is."

Her stomach dropped clean through the floor. "You know?"

"Let me explain before you decide what that means." He stepped back, held the door wider — an invitation she had no business taking and took anyway, some reckless, starving part of her needing the answer more than she needed to be safe getting it.

"Sit down. Please."

She didn't sit, instead she stood in the middle of his living room, arms crossed, phone live and burning a hole in her pocket.

"I run security consulting," he said.

"Part of that is threat assessment — sometimes for clients, sometimes on a subject who doesn't know they're being looked at." He set the photo down on the counter, deliberately, like putting distance between his hands and it.

"A few months ago, a client hired my firm on a stalking case. Content creator, escalating attention online. That photo was in the file I was handed. I didn't take it, Nora."

"Who hired you?"

"I can't tell you that. Client confidentiality — and honestly, it's safer for you not to know yet."

He held her gaze, steady, unblinking. "But I recognized you the second I opened that file. Before you ever moved into this building. I asked to be placed near you. I wanted to make sure whoever was sending those messages couldn't get to you without going through me first."

It was, infuriatingly, a story that almost fit. It explained the coffee. The perfume. The details he shouldn't have known, all of it dressed as casework instead of obsession.

"You should have told me from the start."

"I know." Something cracked in his voice, just enough to sound human instead of rehearsed.

"I kept putting it off because I didn't want you looking at me the way you're looking at me right now."

"How am I looking at you?"

"Like I'm something you have to survive."

The words landed harder than she wanted them to.

She studied his face for the calculation she should have expected from a lie this smooth, and found nothing — which meant either he was telling the truth, or he was better at this than anyone she'd ever met in her life.

"I need time," she said finally. "I need to think."

"Take whatever you need."

He didn't reach for her, he didn't push.

Just let her walk toward the door with the same careful restraint that had made her fall for him in the first place, which was, she realized with a small sick pause, probably the point.

"Nora."

She stopped, hand on the frame.

"The case file's real. Call the firm yourself. I'll give you the number."

She almost took it right then, standing there, needing proof more than she needed the space she'd just claimed for herself.

Instead she left, and didn't remember to end the call in her pocket until she was back in her own apartment with the door locked and her back pressed against it.

"Well?" Delphine's voice came through immediately, sharp, awake.

"I heard some of it. It's a firm, case file. Client confidentiality. That's either the truth or the best cover story I've ever heard in my life."

"I don't know which."

"Then we find out."

The panic in Delphine's voice had burned off into something colder, more useful. "Give me the firm's name. I'll run it quiet. Nothing that gets back to him."

Nora gave her everything — the name, the little details Julian had let slip over three weeks that she'd recorded without meaning to — and hung up feeling marginally steadier than she had in hours.

It lasted twenty minutes.

Her phone lit up with Delphine's name and Nora answered before the first ring finished.

"I searched the firm," Delphine said, too fast, words tripping over each other.

"Cade Security Consulting. It's registered. Real address, real filings, everything checks out on paper."

"Okay. So he told the truth."

"I also searched Julian Cade."

A pause, long enough that Nora's stomach started sinking before Delphine even finished the sentence.

"There's no license under that name in this state. No employee record. Nothing, Nora. He doesn't exist."

"That doesn't make sense. He's lived across the hall from me for three weeks."

"I'm telling you what's on paper."

Delphine's voice had gone thin and fast. "The only name on file as owner of that firm is somebody called Marcus Voight."

Nora's fingers went cold around the phone.

"Marcus," she repeated, the words sounding strange in her own mouth, like she was trying on a name that didn't belong to her yet but was about to.

She didn't know, standing in her locked apartment with the porch light flickering outside — the one Julian had fixed with his own hands — that she'd hear that exact name again in three days, spoken out loud by a stranger's mouth across a restaurant table, in a tone that would make the whole room go quiet.