Chapter 2 Nothing Missing

Ivy's POV

The flash comes and goes so fast I almost don't believe it happened. A hand. Not mine. Pressed flat against a door that won't give, fingers spread wide like she's trying to push the wood itself out of the way.

Then a fist hits my own door, three times, hard enough that the frame rattles, and the button falls out of my grip and rolls under the radiator before I can stop it.

"Police, ma'am. We got a call about a disturbance."

I didn't call anyone. That thought lands somewhere behind the ringing in my ears while I cross the room, window still open behind me, cold air pushing at my back like it wants me to explain that too. I check the peephole out of habit more than caution. Two uniforms. A flashlight beam swinging low across the hallway carpet.

I open the door on the chain first, because some things you don't unlearn just because the danger's supposedly outside now instead of in.

"Ma'am, your neighbor next door reported yelling. Screaming, maybe. Around one forty."

I don't remember screaming. I remember counting, slow and useless, under my breath. I remember the scratch in the paint and the cold metal against my palm, but not my own voice loud enough for anyone through a wall to hear. I unhook the chain anyway, because refusing to let them in tonight, of all nights, is the kind of thing that gets written down and used against you later.

They walk the apartment slow, flashlights cutting across furniture I haven't dusted in a week. One of them checks the window I left open, runs a gloved finger along the sill, right over the scratch. He doesn't ask about it the way I expect him to. He barely looks at it twice.

"Nothing forced here. Latch works fine." He says it to his partner, not to me, like I'm a detail in the room rather than the person who called this in, except I didn't, and that keeps snagging in my head every time he talks past me instead of to me.

"That scratch is new," I say, before I can stop myself.

"Could be from the window sliding. Metal on metal does that." He doesn't even crouch down to look closer. "You said you heard scraping before the officer knocked?"

"Before that. Earlier."

"How much earlier."

"An hour, maybe more."

He writes something down without repeating it back to me, and I have to fight the urge to lean over and ask what exactly he's writing, because whatever it is, it's already decided before he's finished the sentence.

"Anything missing? Jewelry, electronics?"

"No." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Nothing's missing."

The younger one taps something into a tablet without looking up. The older one glances at the radiator, at the small dull shape half wedged beneath it that used to be sitting in my palm two minutes ago, and for one terrible second I think he's going to crouch down and pick it up himself, turn it over, ask me what it is and why my hands won't stop moving whenever it's mentioned.

He doesn't. He straightens up instead and flips his notepad shut.

I could tell him. The thought sits there for a full second, real enough to almost move my mouth. I could say a hand pressed against a door in my head the moment I touched that thing, say it plain, and watch exactly how fast his face changes from patient to careful. I already know how that goes. I've watched it happen twice before in this same room.

I say nothing instead.

"This address has come up before," he says, not unkind, just flat, the way you'd read a label off a can. "Two years back. Then again last spring. You remember that?"

Heat crawls up my neck fast enough that I have to look away from both of them. I remember it fine. I remember exactly how it went the last two times, the way their faces did this same thing, this same softening that isn't sympathy, it's patience, the kind you save for someone you've already decided isn't quite reliable.

"I remember," I say, because lying about it would only make the softening worse.

"We're not finding anything to suggest forced entry tonight. No damage beyond that one scratch, which could be old." He says could be old like he's being generous. "You want, we can log it as suspicious activity, no further action unless something else happens."

Unless something else happens. I almost laugh, and it isn't funny, none of it is funny, but there's a specific kind of anger that comes out sounding like laughter if you don't clamp your jaw down fast enough.

"Log it," I say instead.

They leave twelve minutes after they arrived. I know because I watch the clock the entire time they're in my apartment, the same way I watch it every time someone with a badge decides what did or didn't happen to me. The door clicks shut behind them. I throw the deadbolt, then the chain, then stand there with my palm flat against the wood like I can feel through it whether they've actually walked away or if one of them lingered outside just long enough to hear what I do next.

I don't move for a while. I make myself count the seconds it takes for their footsteps to fade past the elevator, and even after I can't hear them at all anymore, I stay right where I am, palm against the door, waiting for a sound that never comes.

Silence holds for a long time after that. Long enough that my legs stop shaking on their own, which is somehow worse than the shaking, because it means my body's decided the danger passed and it clearly hasn't, not really, not with that mark still in the paint and a button still sitting under my radiator like it's waiting me out.

I get down on my knees to reach for it. My fingers close around cold metal, and this time nothing rushes in to interrupt it, no fist on the door, no flashlight, no voice asking about noise complaints from two years back.

I sit back against the radiator, knees pulled up, button held loose in my palm, and I tell myself I'm only checking it for damage. That's the lie I use to justify closing my hand around it fully instead of just holding it flat.

The moment my fingers curl shut, the room drops away entirely, faster and harder than it did through the window glass, and this time there's no fist on any door to pull me back out of it.

A hallway, narrow, lit by one bulb that flickers on a delay. A woman's hand slams flat against a door that's already locked from the other side, knuckles white, desperate in a way that has nothing gentle left in it. Her mouth is moving. No sound reaches me, just the shape of a word forming over and over, the same word, and somewhere behind her, footsteps that aren't hurrying because they don't need to.