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He couldn’t stop it. He wasn’t doing it. It was doing itself.

“Leo!”

The sound of Nate’s voice was closer now. Why was he not running away? He was supposed to be running away!

But Leo could sense him. Close to him. Coffee and sawdust.

The house went still.

Silence. Blackness. Somewhere a pipe ticked.

Leo stood on the stairs. He was shaking. He hadn’t known he could shake.

“Leo.” Glass crunched under a boot. “You okay?”

Leo stared at the spot next to him where the voice had come from.

“I don’t know,” he said.

There was a rustle that sounded like Nate was digging through his pocket, and then a small white light bloomed in the dark and found the stairs.

“Okay,” Nate said. “Let’s go up.”

Chapter

Fourteen

Nat cut eleven seconds of silence from his latest video.

In the raw footage, he stood beneath the kitchen’s newly exposed bead board, explaining which sections could be saved and which had warped beyond repair. Then he stopped talking and looked past the camera.

Nothing happened.

After eleven seconds, he turned back and continued discussing wood filler.

Nate dragged the cut tighter.

The pause had made sense at the time. Leo had been sitting on the counter, washed pale against the green cabinets, and Nate had expected him to object to something. The wood filler. The cabinets.

Anything.

Leo hadn’t.

He hadn’t objected much in three days.

Just yesterday, Nate had removed an entire section of damaged trim without receiving a single threat against his life.

It was weird.

He cut another pause from the footage.

Behind him, the house settled with a soft creak.

Nate glanced toward the doorway, then returned to the screen.

Whatever Leo was doing, it wasn’t Nate’s concern as long as he remained stable. And he was stable, right?

Just tired.