Chapter 5 You Touched It

Ivy's POV

A man stands on the other side of the peephole, badge already raised level with the glass like he expected me to need convincing before I even opened my mouth.

I don't open the door. Not yet. My hand stays flat against the wood, weighing whether the chain alone is enough if this goes wrong, running the math on how many seconds it would take me to reach the bat from here instead. I ask through the wood who he is, and he answers before I finish the question, calm, like he's done this exact thing a hundred times and knows exactly how long people like me take to decide.

"Detective Callum Ashby. I'm not who came out last night."

"I didn't ask who you weren't."

Five minutes. Everyone who's ever wanted something from me starts with a number small enough to sound harmless. I unhook the chain but leave it hanging, cracking the door two inches instead of letting it swing wide. He holds the badge closer, patient, not pushing it through the gap, just letting me look as long as I need to. Tired eyes. A jacket that looks slept in rather than worn on purpose. Nothing about him screams danger the way the man on my fire escape did, but nothing about him screams safe either, and I've stopped trusting my ability to tell the difference.

"It's early for a house call," I say.

"You touched it."

Not a question. He says it flat, like a fact he's already confirmed somewhere I can't see, and my whole body goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the draft coming through the gap in the door.

"Touched what."

"The button." His eyes drop briefly to the bag still sitting by my feet, the one I packed an hour ago, folder and evidence bag zipped inside it, and something shifts in his face when he sees it, something close to relief. "You still have it."

I don't answer that. I ask how he knows about a detail that never made it into any report, not from an officer who barely glanced at the sill last night, not from anyone who's had a reason to talk to me since.

"The officer who came out is a friend of mine. He mentioned it in passing this morning, an old button, weird case number scratched into it, didn't think much of it himself." Callum's jaw works once before he keeps going, like the next part costs him something to say out loud. "I do think much of it. I need to see it."

"Why."

He doesn't answer that one straight away either. His eyes go past me, to the wall behind my head, somewhere neither of us is actually looking, and for a second I think he's going to give me some rehearsed line about protecting the public, the kind of answer that would send me right back to shutting the door in his face.

"Because I'm not supposed to be standing here." He says it plain, no shame in it, just a fact laid down between us the same way he laid down my name a minute ago. "This isn't my case. I'm not even on shift yet. I read the address in that report and I got in my car before I finished my coffee."

Something about the honesty of that catches me off guard more than a badge or a title ever could have. Nobody dismissive shows up at seven in the morning uninvited. Nobody who thinks I'm imagining things drives across the city before their shift starts.

"That's not an answer," I say, even though it already worked on me more than I want to admit.

"It's the only one I've got right now." A muscle moves in his jaw, quick, gone before I can decide what it means. "Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

I open the door the rest of the way.

He doesn't step in right away, which surprises me more than if he had. He waits at the threshold, hands loose at his sides, like crossing it without permission would undo whatever ground he just gained. I step back instead, an invitation I don't fully mean to give, and he comes in slow, eyes moving once around the room, not lingering on anything, not the way the officer's did last night when he catalogued my apartment like evidence of something wrong with me.

He stops by the desk, close enough to the closet box still sitting open on the floor that I have to fight the urge to kick it shut. His eyes flick to it once, then back to me, and he doesn't ask, which somehow makes me more aware of it than if he had.

"You said you need to see it," I say, because standing in silence with a stranger in my living room isn't something I know how to do gracefully.

I crouch by the bag and pull the button free from the folded page, still wrapped in its sandwich bag, and hold it out at arm's length instead of handing it over. He takes it carefully, two fingers through the plastic, turning it toward the window light exactly the way I did last night under the lamp.

"Same placement of the numbers. Same exact depth on the cuts." He says it mostly to himself, low, and something about watching him read the same details I spent hours decoding alone last night makes my throat tighten in a way I don't have a name for.

"You've seen one like it before."

He doesn't answer right away. He sets the button down on my desk, gentle, like it might still be capable of hurting someone, and reaches into the jacket he's still wearing, pulling out a thin folder I hadn't noticed him carrying until now, tucked against his side the whole time like he'd been holding it ready to use before I ever opened the door.

"Twenty long years ago," he says. "A case nobody's touched in twenty years except me."

He opens the folder gently on my desk beside the button, and I lean forward without deciding to, some part of me already bracing before I understand exactly what I'm bracing for.

Inside, clipped to a yellowed evidence photo, is a coat button. Same dull brass. Same greenish rot at the edges. Same crooked little scratch running along one side like the person who made it wasn't steady when they carved it.

He slides the photo closer, close enough that I can see it sitting inches from the real thing on my desk, and neither one of us says a word while I look from one to the other, waiting for a single difference to show up between them. My eyes trace the crooked scratch on the photo, then the identical one on the button under my lamp, back and forth, three times, four, like repetition might change what's actually there.

There isn't one.