Quiet footsteps on the stairs, then she's in the kitchen doorway. Hair pulled back. Her own clothes now instead of my henley. The shift registers like a loss I don't have the right to name.
Her eyes are dry. Her chin is level. The sunshine is gone — not dimmed but deliberately packed away, stored somewhere he can't reach it. What's left is harder. Quieter. A version of Kari I've never met.
"I'm going to fix the wall."
"Kari—"
"Not today. I know. Crime scene. Evidence. Don't touch anything." She leans against the doorframe. Arms crossed. "But I'm going to fix it. He doesn't get to have the last word on a wall in my house."
I nod. There's nothing else to offer.
She pours hour-old coffee, sips it without flinching. Stares out the window — Oren walking to his mailbox in his flat cap, Nina sweeping the sidewalk, the ordinary afternoon of a block that doesn't know what's happening inside these walls.
"He wants me to leave." Not to me. To the window. To the house. "The notes, the letters, the photograph, the bird."
She knows about the bird — or suspects. I don't ask. She reads me better than I read camera footage, which is a professional failing I should address and absolutely won't.
"He wants me scared enough to sell. Scared enough to walk away from Margit's house. From Nina and Oren. From everything." Her thumb finds her teeth. Taps once. "It's working."
The admission is so quiet I almost miss it.
"You're scared."
"I'm terrified." No performance. Just fact. "But I'm not leaving. Terror and surrender are two different things. He can have one but not the other."
Something structural shifts in my chest. The kind of settling that can't be reversed.
"I need you to trust me." Rougher than intended.
"I do."
"Not the cover. Not the assignment. Me. I will find how he's getting in. I will find where he watches from. He will never stand in your house again."
Kari studies me. That wall-reading gaze — searching for the places where the promise might not hold.
Whatever she finds is enough. She nods once, walks to the pantry.
"I'm making banana bread."
"It's your third loaf this week."
"Then Oren's going to have a very good week." She pulls flour from the shelf, sets it on the counter with a thud. Looks at me over her shoulder. "You should call Evie."
"I already called Vance."
"Call Evie directly. She's smarter than all of you, and she doesn't waste time being polite about it."
She's right. I pull out my phone.
Kari measures flour in the failing afternoon light, hands steady, jaw set. In the other room, a wall bears her name in jagged letters. Outside, somewhere I haven't found yet, a man with a silver Altima is watching. Compressing the distance between surveillance and something worse.
I dial Evie's number. My eyes stay on Kari — the set of her shoulders, the precision of her hands, the terrifying composure of a woman who told me she's afraid and then started baking like fear is something she can fold into the batter and burn away.
He was in this house while she slept. While I held her. While the operative was gone and only the man remained.
He was here. I didn't know.
That's the cost. Not the bird, not the wall, not the name scratched in plaster. The cost is the distance between what I promised and what I failed to prevent — and the woman measuring flour who deserves better than a protector who let the threat walk through the door because he was too busy falling in love to hear it.
