Chapter 4 The Knock

Ivy's POV

Morning light comes through the blinds in thin gray lines before I've decided whether I slept at all. The button sits on my desk where I left it, six scratched digits facing up, and I've been staring at it long enough that the numbers don't look like numbers anymore, just shapes that mean the worst thing I've ever known is true.

I get up because staying still isn't doing anything for me except making my knees ache against the floorboards. There's a box in the bottom of my closet I haven't opened since I moved into this apartment, sealed with tape gone yellow at the edges, and I drag it out into the middle of the room before I let myself think too hard about why. It's heavier than it looks, mostly because I packed it in a hurry the day I signed this lease, shoving every piece of paper from the old place in without sorting any of it first.

My hands know the tape line before my eyes find it. I peel it back in one long strip and the smell hits first, old paper, a little bit of mildew from the one summer I didn't run the dehumidifier. Inside, a manila folder I was never supposed to keep a copy of. I took it anyway, the week after, back when I still believed having my own copy of the file meant I had some control over what happened to me. I remember standing at the copier at my old job, waiting for it to finish, terrified someone would walk in and ask what I was printing.

I find the page I want fast, because I've read this folder enough times that my fingers remember it even when I try not to. The case number sits printed clean and official at the top corner, typed, not scratched into metal by hand, but the digits are the same six I've had memorized since the week I got discharged.

I set the button beside the page and look at both at once, just to be sure my eyes aren't doing something my brain wants them to do. They match. They matched last night too, under the lamp, but seeing it typed in black ink instead of carved crooked into old brass makes it worse somehow, more official, less like something I imagined.

I almost close the folder there. That would be the sane thing, the thing a person does when they've confirmed what they already knew and don't need to go digging any further into a night that already cost them enough sleep. My hand doesn't close it. It turns the page instead, because some part of me has never once been satisfied with confirming a thing and walking away from it.

The second page stops me harder than the first one did.

A stamp sits across the bottom corner, red ink faded to a dull rust color with age. Case status: closed, inactive. Dated four months after the attack. Four months. I remember that stretch of my life mostly as a blur of appointments and locked doors and flinching at car horns, and nowhere in that blur does anyone ever tell me my own case had been shelved. Nobody called. Nobody sent a letter. I spent the better part of a year still checking my locks twice a night for a case that had already been quietly filed away like it was finished business.

My throat goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with fear this time. This one's closer to rage, the kind that sits low and doesn't need to shout to be real. Somebody made a decision about my own life without me in the room, and I only find out about it three years later because a stranger left a button on my windowsill. I flip back to the front page like the date might have changed if I look again, but it hasn't, the ink hasn't moved, and neither has the fact that I spent an entire year grieving something the department had already decided wasn't worth their time.

I think about the officer from last night, the way he wrote something down without reading it back to me, the way his partner barely glanced at the scratch in my paint. I wonder now if that's not carelessness at all. I wonder if a case with my address attached to it comes with some kind of warning label nobody bothers explaining to the new guys, just a quiet understanding passed along that this one isn't worth the effort.

I don't cry. I want to say I do, because it would make more sense, but what actually happens is my hands go steady in a way they haven't been all night, and I start pulling on clothes like I have somewhere to be, because I do. I'm taking both pages and the button straight to the precinct myself this morning, in person, and I'm not leaving until somebody with more authority than a patrol officer looks me in the eye and explains why a case gets closed without the victim ever finding out.

I'm zipping my bag, the button wrapped in a spare sandwich bag and pressed flat between the folder pages so it can't roll loose again, when three knocks land on my front door.

Not soft. Not a neighbor borrowing sugar or a delivery guy leaving a package on a mat. Three knocks, evenly spaced, deliberate enough that whoever's doing it wants me to know they're not going away until I answer.

I go still by the bag, one strap still in my hand, and every version of the last twelve hours runs through my head at once. The scratch on the window. The officer who barely glanced at it. A woman's hand against a locked door and a name that never got an answer. My apartment is three floors up in a building where the front entrance requires a key or a buzz-in, and I never buzzed anyone up, and it's not even seven in the morning yet.

For a second I consider that it could be nothing. A neighbor locked out, a landlord doing an early inspection nobody warned me about. My body doesn't believe either option enough to relax, and I've learned to trust my body over my own optimism these last few years, because my optimism has been wrong more times than I can count and my body hasn't lied to me yet.

I set the bag down slow, quiet, the way you set something down when you don't want it to make a sound. My eyes go to the peephole, then to the bat still leaned against my nightstand where I left it hours ago, close enough to grab if I need it, far enough that crossing the room to get it means whoever's on the other side of that door will hear me move.

The knock comes again. Three more, same rhythm as before, patient in a way that feels worse than urgency would.

I cross to the door on bare feet, careful, silent, and press my eye to the peephole.