The knock comes at seven a.m. sharp.
I know it's him before I open the door. I don't know how I know. I just do, the specific quality of it, three knocks, even spacing, the kind of knock that expects to be answered.
I open the door in my oversized sweater and yesterday's ponytail, camera strap still around my neck because I sleep with it on the nightstand and picked it up out of habit, and Rhett Calloway is standing on my doorstep with a folder in his hand looking like a man who has never once in his life stood at a door that wasn't already expecting him.
He's in a different suit, of course he is. It's seven in the morning and he looks like he's already closed two deals.
I look at the folder. "No."
"Good morning," he says, like I didn't speak. "Can I come in?"
"You're already about to."
He doesn't deny this.
>>>
He delivers the ground rules standing just inside my doorway , not quite in, not quite out, like he's decided the threshold is the right place to conduct a briefing. A check-in schedule. Flagged locations I'm not supposed to visit alone. A note about Joel that makes my jaw tighten because hearing my ex-boyfriend's name come out of this man's mouth at seven a.m. is a specific kind of awful I wasn't prepared for.
What I don't say, I know he was at the fence last night. The text came at 3:18 a.m., which means he was there at 3:18 a.m., standing at my spot in the dark. I don't know what to do with that, so I'm not going to touch it. I'm going to take apart these ground rules instead because I'm good at it and it's easier.
"The check-in schedule," I say. "Twice a day is excessive."
"It's not."
"I'm a twenty-two-year-old photography student, not a witness in protective custody."
"Once in the morning, once in the evening. Non-negotiable."
I look at him, he looks back, he's not annoyed, he's not defensive. He just waits, like he has all the time in the world and has already accounted for my objections in whatever spreadsheet lives in his head.
"Fine," I say. "But I'm not texting you my location like some kind of tracking app, a simple I'm-alive message. That's it."
Something shifts behind his eyes, almost a concession. "That works."
One to me.
The flagged locations are reasonable, I'll give him that, even though I'm not going to say so. Three places Joel has shown up before, two areas around campus with bad lighting and no foot traffic. I argue about one of them because it's where I shoot on Tuesday evenings and it has the best alley light in the city.
He looks at the address I show him on my phone. Looks at me. "You go with someone."
"Lena doesn't care about alley light."
"Then find someone who does, or I go with you."
I stare at him. He stares back. Neither of us moves.
"Fine," I say again. Two to me.
He holds three, the building log protocol, the emergency contact update, and a thing about my studio hours that I object to on principle but not in practice because he's right and I hate it.
Neither of us says out loud that we just negotiated. Neither of us says it felt like we were doing it between equals. I'm not sure what to do with that either, so I add it to the pile.
>>
I'm watching his face while I argue about the studio hours and I see it , the moment his attention shifts. He's looking past me. At the wall.
I turn. He's looking at my photographs.
I have them everywhere , overlapping rows pinned to the plaster, organized by nothing except where I was standing when I thought a shot was good enough to keep. Street portraits, architecture, abstract light studies, the series I did last semester on what people carry. He moves through them the way people move through art when they don't know they're being watched.
He stops at one.
The condemned building. A place I found by accident six months ago , three stories of broken glass and exposed rebar and, at dawn, the most extraordinary light I've ever shot in. I wasn't supposed to be there. I was extremely supposed to not be there. I went anyway because I checked the structural reports and calculated the risk and decided it was worth it.
He looks at that photograph for two full seconds longer than someone looks at something that means nothing to them.
I wait.
"How did you get in?" he says. Still not looking at me.
I blink. Of everything he could have asked. "The side door was unlocked. I checked the structural reports first."
He looks at me then. Something crosses his face , a specific, small surprise, the kind that belongs to a man who doesn't get surprised often and wasn't expecting to be surprised by me. It's gone in under a second but I caught it.
Then Lena appears in the kitchen hallway in her silk robe.
She takes one look at Rhett in my doorway, performs the slowest and least subtle head-to-toe assessment in recorded history, and says, "I'm Lena. I live here. You can come in."
He steps inside, he does not look comfortable. He looks like a man walking into a room he's already started cataloguing, where things are, how they're organized, what they mean about the person who put them there. His eyes move in the specific way of someone who notices things professionally and can't turn it off.
He doesn't look at my fellowship portfolio spread across the kitchen table. Three months of work. The thing I care about more than anything right now, more than the studio hours and the check-in schedule and all of it. He walks past it without stopping.
Which is fine. It's not his job to notice my portfolio. It would be strange if he did. I am not thinking about it.
He finishes whatever internal inventory he's running, says he'll send the updated schedule by noon, and leaves.
I close the door.
>>>
I stand in my kitchen for a moment. The portfolio is on the table. The photograph of the condemned building is on the wall. He looked at the photograph for two full seconds and walked past the portfolio without a glance and I am 'not' thinking about what that means about which parts of me are worth noticing.
Lena appears in the doorway. She has her coffee. She has the expression.
"So," she says. "You're cooked."
"Absolutely not."
"He looked at your photograph like it told him something he didn't want to know."
I open my mouth. I close it.
She's right. That's exactly what it looked like. And I don't know what to do with that, which means it goes on the pile with everything else I'm not examining today.
>>>
That night the nightmare is worse.
Same hallway, same smell of old wood and chemicals. But louder this time. More specific. My own voice saying a name I can almost, almost hold onto before it dissolves. And at the end of the hallway, where there was nothing before, there's a little boy.
Grey eyes. Standing very still. Just watching.
I wake before dawn with my heart slamming. I reach for my phone on instinct.
A news notification has loaded while I slept. I tap it without thinking.
A man found dead near campus. The article loads. The thumbnail photograph loads.
I go completely still.
I know that face.
Not from real life. From the dream. He was standing behind the little boy with the grey eyes, and now he is in a news article, and his name is in the headline, and I am sitting in my dark bedroom at five in the morning with my phone in my shaking hands staring at a dead man I have dreamed about since I can remember things.