• • •
Rain hammered the apartment windows on Friday evening as Tav stepped out of the elevator.
The hallway was quiet — the quiet that meant empty rather than occupied, as it should be at this hour. He approached 15C, key already in hand, and paused three steps from the door.
Something felt wrong.
Not visibly wrong. The door was locked. The hallway showed nothing out of order. But there was a quality to the air pressure near the door — a subtlety of change, barely perceptible — and something between his shoulder blades had been tightening since the elevator, a physiological response Tav had learned to take seriously.
He entered without sound.
Inside: dim kitchen light, jazz playing softly through the apartment's built-in system, the front windows showing the rain-soaked city in silver and amber. Normal. Except that the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator stood slightly open, and the balcony curtains — which Alistair kept closed — had been shifted approximately three inches from their usual position, and there was a faint trace of cologne underneath the apartment's familiar atmospheric baseline that belonged to neither of them.
Someone had been here.
Not Alistair. Different.
Tav set his bag down without sound and was still making his secondary assessment when the music cut off.
"You realize normal people make noise when they come home," said Alistair from the hallway.
He appeared from the direction of his bedroom wearing black sweats and a loose dark shirt, a towel draped around his neck. Hair still damp, skin carrying the particular warmth of a recent shower. His eyes tracked Tav once — top to bottom,professional and instant — and then settled into the familiar studied casualness.
Fresh shower after a visitor. Tav filed the timing.
"Someone was here," he said.
Alistair's pause was exactly half a second.
"Besides me?"
"Yes."
"That's comforting." He crossed toward the kitchen, opening the fridge. "You sure? I might have left— "
"You left the cabinet open."
Alistair glanced at it. A beat. "Maybe your ghost did it."
Tav crossed to the cabinet and opened it fully. The glasses and plates were exactly where they should be. The angle of the shelf liner had been disturbed — a small thing, almost invisible, the displacement that happened when someone searched quickly and replaced items with care but not precision.
He closed it.
"You had maintenance in today?" Tav asked.
"No clue." Alistair retrieved a water bottle with his right hand, caught it automatically with his left.
The movement was smooth, unconscious, and completely inconsistent with the dominant-hand habits Tav had been cataloguing for a week. "Was out most of the afternoon."
"Where?"
Alistair tilted his head. "Buy me dinner first."
Deflection. Again. Deployed with such practiced charm that a reasonable person would laugh and let it go.
Tav walked back to the main space and looked around slowly. Everything appeared normal.
Everything appeared deliberately, carefully normal.
