I met him before the building, though I didn’t know it then.

He sat three tables across from me at a narrow café that smelled of burnt milk. I remember his hands most. Not what he wore, not his voice. Just his hands—calm, precise. They never trembled, not even when he spilled coffee on his notes and didn’t blink. That kind of stillness is learned, I think. Or maybe born from having nothing left to lose.

He watched me. That much I’m sure of now. I thought I was the one following, the one with the pattern, the one with the secret. But all along, I was being drawn in.

The building had no lights on the upper floors. The corridor smelled of paper and iron, as if people once worked here and forgot to return. Inside the first room: chairs stacked, a desk, a cracked photograph of a woman in a summer dress. She was smiling at someone outside the frame. I stayed there a long time, trying to imagine the person she looked at. What kind of presence earns that expression?

Then I heard the door click shut behind me.

He was already in the room.

“You left your mark,” he said. “People don’t usually do that.”

I didn’t answer. My heart was louder than I liked.

He walked to the desk, touched the photograph, tilted it back into place like it mattered.

“You think you’re the only one watching?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you do. You followed me here. That makes you a collector. Or a thief. Which one are you?”

I said nothing.

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“There are others, you know,” he said. “People like you. Like me. We don’t speak much. But we notice things—what people leave behind when they think no one’s watching.”

He stepped closer.

“What did you see in me?”

I shrugged. “A limp. A coat. A silence.”

“Wrong answer,” he said. “Try again. What did you want to see?”

That stopped me. I didn’t know. I hadn’t known for weeks.