The house was the kind of old that didn’t apologize for it — gray stone, ivy that had clearly been told to behave and mostly hadn’t, a wraparound porch with a light on even though it was barely past dusk, like someone inside had decided the evening needed encouragement.
There was a rose garden along the front path exactly as advertised, climbing a low iron fence in a riot of dark red that looked less planted than negotiated with, and I stood at the gate for a second longer than necessary, struck by the specific, useless thought that my father would have had opinions about the pruning.
The street name on the corner sign said Larkin, which meant nothing to me, except that it pulled at something anyway, the way certain street names do when you’ve lived in a city your whole life and every block has secretly been a hundred different versions of itself across thirty years.
I’d lived four blocks from this house, give or take, for most of that time, and I had never once walked down it, which struck me, standing there, as either a coincidence or a small mercy, and I genuinely couldn’t have told you which.
The door opened before I reached it.
“Mr. Taylor,” said the man on the other side, in a voice so dry it could have cured the roses behind me.
He was tall, silver at the temples, dressed like he’d been interrupted mid-formal-occasion that had never actually been scheduled.
“Mr. Grey said to expect you at seven. It is currently six fifty-eight. I find that promising.”
“You must be Norwood.”
“I must be,” he agreed, stepping back to let me in, and there was something in the way he said it, light and dry and entirely unbothered, that I liked immediately and without reservation, the way you sometimes like people before you’ve earned the right to.
The front hall smelled like woodsmoke and something green, lemon balm maybe, or rosemary, and I thought of my mother’s kitchen before I could stop myself, which felt like an unfair thing for a stranger’s house to do to me without warning.
“He’s in the study,” Norwood said, leading me down a hall lined with framed photographs I tried very hard not to stare at and failed almost immediately.
A much younger Fenrir, gap-toothed, maybe nine, standing in front of what looked like this exact house with significantly less ivy.
A woman who had to be his mother, laughing at something outside the frame.
No father in any of the photos that I could see, which I noted and set aside, because it wasn’t my business and because Norwood was watching me notice, in the unhurried, unbothered way of a man who’d clearly stood in this hallway with other guests doing the exact same thing.
“He doesn’t usually have people back here,” Norwood said, conversationally, not looking at me.
“You should feel free to take that as significant or not, as you like. I find guests enjoy having the option.”
“Is that your way of telling me something?”
“It’s my way of saying nothing in a tone that implies I could, if pressed.” He stopped at a heavy door, knocked once, and opened it without waiting for an answer, which told me something about the actual operating rules of this house that the photographs hadn’t.
“Mr. Taylor, sir.”
“Clancy’s fine,” I said, mostly to Norwood, who inclined his head like he’d file the correction away and use it exactly as often as he felt like.
The study had more books in it than my entire apartment, organized in a way that looked careless until you noticed it wasn’t, and a fireplace that was actually lit, actual wood, actual flame, the kind of detail that felt almost theatrical in a city where most fireplaces were decorative gas inserts nobody bothered turning on.
Fenrir was at a low table near it, sleeves rolled, no tie, looking less like my boss and more like a man who’d been interrupted in the middle of being a person.
“You found it,” he said, like the house had been hard to find, which it hadn’t, except in every other sense.
“Norwood found me, mostly.”
“He does that.” Fenrir gestured at the chair across from him.
There was a bottle of wine already open and two glasses, only one of them poured, which felt like a specific kind of consideration I didn’t have a category for yet — not presumptuous, not performative, just ready, the way you’d set a table for someone you trusted to show up.
I sat.
The fire did the thing fires do, made the whole room feel like it was holding its breath, and for a second neither of us said anything, which under fluorescent office light would have felt unbearable and here just felt like part of the furniture.
“This is a lot of house for one person,” I said, mostly to fill the silence, and immediately regretted it, because it sounded like an accusation even though I hadn’t meant it as one.
“It was my mother’s.” He said it simply, without the practiced weight people usually put on sentences like that, which somehow made it land harder.
“She died when I was seventeen. I kept the house. Norwood came with it, more or less — he worked for her, and when she was gone he just sort of… stayed. I’ve never had the nerve to ask if that’s because he likes me or because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Honestly? Both. He’d deny the first part under oath.” A small, real smile, gone almost as fast as it arrived.
“Pour yourself a glass. We have actual work to discuss, and I find people lie less convincingly about their progress when they’ve had a drink first.”
“Is that a threat or an observation?”
“With me,” he said, “it’s rarely just one thing.”
We went over the slide again — Candidate A, the posting overlap, the syntax patterns I’d built out of nothing but my own handwriting turned sideways — and Fenrir asked sharper questions than he had at the office, the kind of questions that came from a man who’d had hours alone with the material instead of minutes, and I answered them as carefully as I’d answered anything in my life, watching the fire instead of his face whenever the lying got close to the surface.
“You really think it’s him,” Fenrir said, at one point, tapping the candidate’s name on the screen.
“Genuinely. Not performing certainty for my benefit.”
“I think it’s plausible.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I looked up.
The Fenrir Line was there, faint, more thoughtful than suspicious, and something about the firelight made his eyes look less gray and more the color of weather right before it changes.
“I think,” I said, choosing each word like it might detonate, “that whoever Red is, he’s spent a long time building walls specifically so people like us couldn’t get past them. I think if we do find him, it’s not going to be because the data led us there. It’s going to be because he let something slip he didn’t mean to.”
“That’s a strange way to talk about a stranger.”
“I’ve read a lot of his stuff.”
“You said that already. About the cover trends post.” Fenrir leaned back, considering me with the specific unhurried attention that made my skin feel two sizes too small.
“You talk about him like you know him. Not like a fan. Like a friend you’ve lost touch with.”
The fire popped.
Somewhere down the hall, faintly, I heard Norwood doing something with what sounded like teacups, an ordinary domestic noise that felt, in that moment, like the only normal thing left in the entire house.
“Maybe that’s just what good writing does,” I said.
“Makes strangers feel like friends.”
“Maybe,” Fenrir said, in a tone that meant he didn’t believe me even slightly, and also, somehow, that he wasn’t going to push it tonight, which was its own kind of mercy, the first one he’d given me since this whole thing started.
He gave me a tour after, unprompted, the way people do when they’ve had half a glass of wine and want an excuse to keep someone in their house a little longer without admitting that’s what’s happening.
The kitchen, oddly small for the size of the place, like his mother had cared more about cooking than entertaining.
A sunroom full of plants Norwood apparently maintained with the same dry, unbothered competence he brought to everything else.
A back door that opened onto a yard bigger than I expected, gone wild at the edges, with an old wooden structure half-collapsed against the back fence that had clearly once been a treehouse and now mostly served as a place for ivy to practice ambition.
I stopped walking when I saw it.
I couldn’t have told you why, exactly, except that something about the angle of the broken ladder, the specific shade the wood had gone gray, pulled at the same unplaceable thread the street name had pulled at the gate, a feeling like standing in a room you’ve definitely never been in and recognizing the smell anyway.
“That’s been there since before I was born,” Fenrir said, following my gaze.
“My mother always meant to take it down. Never did. I think she liked having proof a kid used to live here, even after I stopped being one.”
“Did you build it?”
“No. It was already there when we moved in. I was maybe six.” He said it lightly, looking at the structure instead of me, which meant he didn’t see whatever had happened to my face in that half-second, the cold drop of something I couldn’t name yet sliding down through my chest like a stone through water.
“Funny thing to keep, a half-rotted treehouse. But you don’t tear down the things that remind you of being happy, even after the happy part’s over.”
“No,” I said, quieter than I meant to.
“You really don’t.”
We stood there a while longer, in the dark, in a yard that smelled like cut grass and something underneath it I couldn’t place, and neither of us said anything else about the treehouse, though I noticed, walking back toward the house, that he glanced at it once more before he closed the door, the specific look of a man checking that an old wound was still exactly where he’d left it.
Norwood walked me out at nine, the roses bowing slightly under the porch light like they too had opinions about late departures.
“He doesn’t show people the treehouse,” Norwood said, conversationally, at the gate, in the same dry register he’d used for everything else that night, which made it land harder, not softer.
“I’ve worked here eleven years. I believe you’re the third.”
“Is that significant?”
“I find guests enjoy having the option of deciding that for themselves.” A faint, almost imperceptible smile.
“Goodnight, Mr. Taylor. Drive safely. Or walk safely, I suppose, given the four blocks.”
I was halfway down the path before the sentence caught up with me.
I turned back, but the door was already closed, the porch light steady behind the glass, and I stood there in the dark trying to remember if I’d told anyone in that house, at any point that night, exactly how far away I lived.
I hadn’t.
I walked the four blocks home with my hands in my pockets and my collar up against a wind that had no business being that cold in May, turning the whole evening over and over, the photographs with no father in them, the mother dead at seventeen, the treehouse nobody tore down, Norwood’s careful, deliberate slip that hadn’t felt like a slip at all the longer I thought about it.
Something about that house had reached into me and pulled on a thread I didn’t know was still attached to anything, and I didn’t yet have the first idea what it was unraveling, only that it had started, somewhere between the rose garden and the broken ladder, and that it wasn’t going to stop just because I’d made it home.
I lay awake longer than I wanted to admit, turning the treehouse over in my mind like a stone I couldn’t put down, and somewhere underneath all of it, quiet and unwelcome, was the specific, useless feeling of having been somewhere before and not being able to say when.