The sirens were just color to me.
Blue and red stuttered against my living room wall, painting my bookshelves in pulsing stripes. The glass vibrated faintly under my palm, but the sound—whatever shrieked through the street—was a familiar emptiness. Noise without teeth.
I should have been working. A fox with a crooked crown waited half-finished on my tablet, its tail still a ghost outline. Instead I stood at my window, forehead against the cool pane, watching my building turn into a crime scene.
Down on the sidewalk, uniforms moved like a choreographed dance I couldn’t quite follow. One officer spoke into a radio, mouth moving fast. Another stretched yellow tape, bright against gray rain and brick. A white sheet on a stretcher vanished into the open ambulance doors.
My neighbor. 4B. I’d seen her in the laundry room three days ago. Pink scrubs, tired smile, hair twisted into a knot with a pencil through it.
I told myself it could be anything. A heart attack. A fall. An accident.
The detective’s face said otherwise.
She stood a little apart from the others, shoulders squared, dark hair pulled into a low bun, suit already damp from drizzle. Her gaze traveled up the building like it could peel back walls. When her eyes reached my floor, I instinctively stepped back from the glass.
I hated this part. The staring, the not-knowing, the way people’s expressions tightened when they realized I couldn’t hear them.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. I crossed the room, bare feet silent on the hardwood, and picked it up.
ZOE: "U home??? what is HAPPENING"
Another burst of messages stacked under it in frantic bubbles.
ZOE: "saw cops by the front entrance"
"answer me, heathen"
"they wont let me up!!!"
I smiled despite the clamp of tension in my chest and typed back.
ME: "I’m home. I don’t know yet. They haven’t come to my door. Are you okay?"
The reply came fast.
ZOE: "im fine just pissed. they said 'hold on, ma’am' in that tone. you know the one."
"im coming up when i can. DON'T OPEN YOUR DOOR unless its me or like, ryan gosling with a pizza"
I huffed out a breath—almost a laugh—and set the phone down. My tea had gone cold beside it, a ring of condensation ghosting on the wood.
The elevator dinged down the hall, muffled through my door more from distance than silence. I’d grown good at feeling things through my feet, the way an old building carried vibration like gossip. Heavy steps. Two sets. Maybe three. They stopped outside my apartment.
A knock—dull through the door. I saw it rather than heard it: the tiny flicker of the peephole’s shadow, the tremor where the frame met the wall. Not Zoe-light. Not hesitant.
My pulse tripped.
I didn’t open right away. Instead, I looked at the security camera feed on my phone—the app linked to the hallway cam our landlord had begrudgingly installed after a break-in last year.
One cop in uniform, wide shoulders, hat in hand. And beside him, a man in a dark jacket, no visible badge. He stood slightly angled, face turned toward my door like he could see through it. Short brown hair, a precise cut. Clean jaw. Eyes I couldn’t quite catch from the camera’s angle.
