Isaac didn't breathe for a second.
Then he looked at the number again like that was going to help. It didn't.
He didn't need a name on it.
Jadah had been blocked on three different numbers by now. Four, maybe. At some point it stopped being communication and turned into migration. She'd just keep finding a new way back in.
He stepped closer to the window, careful not to put his whole face in it. Habit.
Down on the sidewalk, half under the weak shade of the building awning, Jadah stood with one hand on her hip and the other around her phone. Gray hoodie. Black shorts. White sneakers too clean for this block. Big silver hoops catching the evening light every time she moved her head. Even from up here he could tell she was doing that still thing she did when she was angry and pretending not to be.
Which was worse than when she actually started yelling.
As if she felt him looking, her head tipped up.
Their eyes met.
Isaac moved back from the window on instinct, annoyed at himself the second he did it.
His phone buzzed again.
Jadah: saw u
He closed his eyes.
Of course she did.
Another one came in.
Jadah: don't make me ring all the bells in this building
He stared at that a beat longer than he should have.
There it was. The thing about Jadah. She never entered a room politely. If a door didn't open fast enough, she turned herself into the reason it had to.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard.
Isaac: why are you here
The typing bubble came up immediately. Dropped. Came back.
Jadah: come downstairs
Isaac: no
Jadah: isaac
Jadah: i'm serious
Isaac almost laughed at that, but there wasn't enough humor in him for it.
Serious. Jadah was always serious while she was setting fire to something.
He typed, deleted, typed again.
Isaac: whatever you need it's not here
Her reply landed before he could lock the screen.
Jadah: it's not a thing
Jadah: just come outside
His jaw tightened.
The group chat chose that moment to explode again. Ty sent a voice note. Marlon sent three question marks. Somebody named Nia dropped a location pin and a string of flame emojis like that meant anything useful.
Isaac muted the chat without listening to a word of it.
Then he looked back out the window.
Jadah hadn't moved. Not really. But there was a charge to her now, small and ugly. Her weight shifting. One sneaker tapping once against the concrete, then stopping. She was trying not to make a scene.
Meaning she was about thirty seconds away from absolutely making one.
"Perfect," Isaac said to nobody.
He grabbed his keys off the crate, shoved his phone in his pocket, and headed for the door.
On the way out he caught himself in the mirror nailed crooked by the entrance.
Black T-shirt. Gray shorts. Sleep still clinging to his face. He looked exactly like a man about to go downstairs and make a bad decision because not making it would be louder.
He locked the apartment behind him and took the stairs down two at a time.
By the second-floor landing, his phone buzzed again.
Ty.
He let it ring out.
By the first floor, his shoulder had started complaining again, that dull pulled ache from sleeping on it wrong. He rolled it once, hard, and pushed through the front door.
Heat hit him first.
Not the soft inside heat from the apartment. Outside heat had grit in it. Car exhaust. Food grease from the corner spot. Warm concrete. Somebody's weed rolling down the block in slow invisible waves.
Jadah looked him over the second he stepped out, and something sharp passed through her face before it flattened into a smile.
It wasn't a nice smile.
It was a smile with a knife hidden in it.
"You took long enough."
Isaac stopped just outside the door and didn't come any closer than he had to.
"You threatened my neighbors. Very persuasive."
"You know I would've done it too."
"I know."
That made something flicker in her eyes. Not guilt. Jadah didn't really do guilt. More like irritation that he'd said it out loud first.
Up close she looked the same and not the same.
Pretty in that dangerous, overfinished way she always managed, even in a hoodie. Hair laid clean. Gloss faded at the center of her mouth where she'd probably bitten it off. Long lashes. Nails done dark. But there were smudges under her eyes, and her energy was off, too tight in the chest, too fast behind the eyes. Wired.
Isaac noticed all of that before he noticed the tiny scrape across one knuckle on her left hand.
She caught him looking and tucked that hand into her sleeve.
"Hi to you too," she said.
"I said hi by coming downstairs."
"Aw. You do care."
"No," Isaac said. "I care about volume."
Her smile got a little more real at that, which annoyed him worse.
Jadah shifted like she was going to step closer. He stayed where he was. The air between them held.
Three months ago, that distance wouldn't have existed. Or if it did, it wouldn't have stayed there long.
Three months ago he'd still been stupid enough to think wanting peace and getting peace were related.
Now he knew better.
She looked past him toward the door. "Can we not do this out here?"
"We can absolutely do this out here."
"Isaac."
"Jadah."
Her nostrils flared.
There it was again. That tiny movement right before she either cried, laughed, or got mean. With her, those were all cousins.
A bus groaned to a stop at the corner. Somebody shouted from across the street. Music leaked from a car with the windows down. The whole block kept moving around them like none of this mattered.
Jadah folded her arms. "You look tired."
"You came here to tell me that?"
"You still talk like everything's a joke when you're scared."
He gave her a flat look. "That line probably kills in your head."
For the first time since he came downstairs, the smile dropped off her face completely.
Good, he thought. There you are.
"What do you want?" he said.
She looked over his shoulder, then up the street, then back at him. Not random. Checking.
Isaac noticed. Of course he noticed.
His voice went quieter. "What do you want, Jadah?"
She licked her lip once. "I needed to see if you were here."
A tired laugh almost came out of him. "You texted me from outside my building. I figured that part out."
"I'm serious."
"That's never comforting coming from you."
"I said I'm serious, Isaac."
"And I heard you. I just don't trust it."
That landed.
Her mouth pressed thin. She took a breath through her nose, held it, let it out slow. Trying for control. She only did that when she thought she might lose it.
Then she said, "Somebody came to my place asking about you."
The block seemed to pull back half an inch.
Isaac didn't move.
"Okay," he said after a second.
Her stare sharpened. "That's it?"
He lifted one shoulder. "People ask about people."
"Not like this."
"What does that mean?"
"It means they knew your full name."
A pause.
That one got through.
Not because full name was impossible. It wasn't. But almost nobody used it unless they already knew him, or wanted him to understand they did.
Jadah saw the shift in his face and pounced on it immediately.
"Yeah," she said. "Exactly."
Isaac's eyes narrowed. "Who?"
"I don't know."
"Then how do you know they were asking about me?"
"Because they showed me a picture, Isaac."
A bus pulled off from the curb with a hiss. The sound filled the space between them and made room for his pulse to get louder.
He kept his expression still.
"What picture?"
"An old one." She glanced away. "From my page."
His jaw locked.
Of course.
Jadah used to post everything. Food, faces, feelings, fights, apologies, hints about apologies, songs that were basically subtweets with a beat under them. She could turn a relationship into public property in under six minutes if you let her.
He had let her. Once.
He was smarter now. A little.
"Delete your old posts," he said.
She let out one breath that almost sounded like disbelief. "That's what you got from this?"
"It's what I got first."
She stared at him. "You're unbelievable."
"You came to my house from a burner number and opened with a threat."
"I came to warn you."
He almost said I didn't ask you to, but the words stopped halfway up.
Warn him.
The scrape on her knuckle. The way she kept checking the street. The fact that she was outside his building instead of flooding his phone with paragraphs like she usually did. The fact that she wasn't trying to start a fight for the pleasure of it. Not yet, anyway.
Something cold slipped under his ribs.
He hated that she saw it.
"I didn't tell them where you live," Jadah said, quieter now. "Before you say it. I didn't."
"I hadn't said anything."
"You were about to."
He was. That irritated him too.
"What did they look like?" he asked.
She answered too fast, like she'd been rehearsing it.
"One was older. Maybe thirties. Beard. Not big, just…" She made a shape with her hands like size would explain character. "Regular. Black jacket. The other one mostly stayed in the car."
"What car?"
"Dark gray sedan. Tint too dark to be legal."
"Plate?"
She laughed once, short and ugly. "Sorry, detective, I was too busy enjoying the experience."
He looked away, toward the corner, thinking.
This could be Jadah doing what Jadah did best: dragging him into some mess orbiting her and calling it fate.
That was the smart read.
The safer read.
It was also possible she'd come here because, for once, the problem wasn't imaginary.
He hated that both felt equally likely.
His phone buzzed again in his pocket. Ty, probably. Or Marlon. Or both.
He ignored it.
"You should've texted," he said.
"I did text."
"Not from outside my building."
"If I said we needed to talk, you wouldn't have answered."
"That's because we don't."
Her face pinched. For one second something real showed through the performance—hurt, hot and immediate.
Then she covered it with contempt.
"You think everything's about you."
"Most things that show up at my door are, yeah."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know. I just liked how it sounded."
"God." She shook her head. "You do that on purpose."
"Yes."
For a second neither of them spoke.
A man pushing a laundry cart rolled past on the sidewalk and gave them the quick, expert glance of somebody who'd lived long enough to spot exes from a block away. He kept going. The wheels squealed over cracked concrete.
Jadah lowered her voice. "He asked if you still stayed with your mother."
Isaac went still.
He hadn't mentioned his mother. She hadn't either. Not until now.
She saw she'd hit something.
"I told him I didn't know," she said. "Which was true. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"I said I hadn't seen you in a while."
He looked at her.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I gave."
He stepped closer before he meant to. Not enough to touch. Enough that she had to tilt her chin up a little to keep the eye contact.
"Who was he, Jadah?"
"I said I don't know."
"Then why are you scared?"
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
For the first time since he came outside, she looked young. Not dramatic, not sharp, not dangerous. Just twenty kinds of bad decision wearing lip gloss and pretending it all still counted as confidence.
When she spoke again, her voice had dropped.
"Because when he saw the picture, he smiled like he already knew you."
Isaac felt that one low in his stomach.
Not fear exactly.
Recognition of shape. The kind of instinct that told you a thing had weight before it landed.
He looked past her, down the street she kept checking.
Traffic moved through the intersection in slow, ordinary lines. Corner store light flickering. Kids cutting through the lot. A delivery bike swerving too close to parked cars. Nothing obvious. Nothing loud.
Still.
"Did he say a name?"
"No."
"Did he say what he wanted?"
"He asked if you were hard to find."
That sat between them.
Ugly sentence.
Ugly enough that even Jadah didn't dress it up.
Isaac rubbed once at the back of his neck.
In his pocket, his phone buzzed again and again.
He took it out this time.
Ty: bro where u at
Ty: marlon driving in ten
Ty: don't disappear today I'm dead serious
He almost smiled at the timing. Almost.
Then Jadah's head snapped toward the corner so fast her hoop earring flashed.
All the color drained out of her face at once.
Isaac turned.
A dark gray sedan was creeping past the stop sign at the end of the block, moving too slow to be traffic, too deliberate to be lost.
The windshield was dark with tint.
The car didn't stop.
It just kept rolling forward, easy as breath, until it reached the front of Isaac's building.
Then it idled.