Chapter 2 AFTER MORNING

ETHAN POV] 

I wake at 6:30 AM exactly, the way I always do.

No alarm. My body has learned the rhythm for three years. the same routine, the same internal clock clicking over with mechanical precision. The light filters through the curtains in pale strips, painting Aria's sleeping face in alternating bands of gold and shadow.

She's on her back, one arm flung across her forehead, the other tucked beneath the pillow. There are dark circles under her eyes that weren't there a month ago. She came home around five I heard her in the kitchen, the coffee maker sputtering to life, then silence. Just sitting there in the dark.

She does that sometimes. I've stopped asking why.

I slide out of bed carefully, trying not to disturb her. She needs rest more than she admits. Her job takes more from her than she's willing to acknowledge fragments of herself left behind in motel rooms and crime scenes, pieces she can't even  get back.

The apartment is silent. I prefer it this way: the world suspended between sleep and waking, when I'm the only one awake to witness it.

In the kitchen, I fill the kettle and set it to boil. While it heats, I retrieve my notebook from the counter where I left it last night. Black leather, worn at the edges. This is the sixth one since I started keeping them three years ago. Before that, I didn't see the point of documenting the ordinary.

Now I understand that nothing is ordinary. Everything matters.

I flip to the last entry I made:

Chapter 17 – The Convergence

Detective Sarah Blackwood discovers the locket at the third crime scene. Silver, antique, engraved with initials that match her partner's. But David has an alibi ironclad, verified, impossible to dispute. So how did his locket end up in a dead woman's hand?

She doesn't report it. Instead, she pockets the evidence, tells herself she's protecting him, that there must be an explanation. Love makes us irrational. Love makes us complicit.

I read it twice, then close the notebook.

The kettle clicks off.

I make my coffee black no sugar or cream. Aria takes hers sweet enough to make me wince, but that's her choice. I've learned not to comment. People have their preferences, their small rituals that make them feel human.

I sit at the kitchen table and look out the window. The street below is mostly empty. A man walks his dog, some small, anxious breed that keeps looking over its shoulder. A car passes, headlights cutting through the early morning fog. Ordinary people doing ordinary things, unaware that they're being observed.

I think about Aria at the motel. I can picture it perfectly the way she would have moved through the room, methodical and careful, cataloging every detail. The way her jaw would have tightened when she saw the bird. The way her breath would have caught when she found the pen.

Did her hands shake when she picked it up?

Probably not. She's good at maintaining composure. That's one of the things I admire about her: the steel beneath the surface, the way she can stand in the wreckage of human cruelty and not flinch.

But I imagine she held it longer than necessary. Turned it over, read the engraving, felt the weight of recognition settle in her chest like a stone.

I imagine she didn't tell anyone.

The coffee is bitter on my tongue, perfect.

Aria emerges from the bedroom at 7:23 AM, already dressed. Her hair is pulled back tight, and she moves with the kind of purposeful energy that suggests she's already halfway to wherever she's going in her mind.

"Morning," I say.

She looks at me, then at the mug I've prepared for her steam still rising, waiting on the counter.

"Morning." She takes the mug but doesn't sit down. "Thanks."

"Another call last night?"

"Yeah."

"The same case?"

She nods, but doesn't meet my eyes.

I wait. Either she'll tell me or she won't.

"Same as the others," she says finally. "Same setup. Same signature."

"That's five now?"

"Five confirmed. Could be more because we haven't connected yet."

I take a sip of my coffee. "Any progress on a profile?"

"We're working with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. They think he's organized, methodical. Probably lives alone or has a space where he can work undisturbed. The origami suggests patience, attention to detail. Maybe an artistic background."

"Sounds like a writer," I say, keeping my tone light.

She looks at me then really looks at me, like she's searching for something in my face.

"Maybe," she says. "Or a surgeon. Or an architect. Or just someone with too much time and a steady hand."

The silence stretches between us, filled with all the things we're not saying.

"You'll figure it out," I tell her. "You always do."

"Yeah." She drains her coffee in three long swallows, then sets the mug in the sink. "I need to get to the station. We're doing a case review at nine."

She kisses my forehead quickly, automatically and then she's gone. I hear the door close, her footsteps in the hallway, the elevator's distant chime.

I remain seated, finishing my coffee in the silence she's left behind.

My study is exactly as I left it. Organized. Everything in its place.

The desk sits beneath the window, positioned to catch the morning light. Bookshelves line two walls reference materials, research books, novels by authors I admire and authors I don't. A filing cabinet in the corner holds old manuscripts, contracts, correspondence.

The manuscript for my third novel sits on the left side of the desk. 342 pages so far. I'm on Chapter Eighteen.

I settle into my chair and open my notebook again. Not the manuscript notebook but the other one. The black leather one.

I flip past the chapter notes to the section at the back. The section I don't let anyone see.

Observations – January 24

A called out at 2:47 AM. The Starlight Motel. Room 406. She was back by 5:15. Made coffee but didn't drink it. Sat in the kitchen for forty-seven minutes in complete darkness. When she finally came to bed, she didn't sleep. Her breathing never settled into the deep rhythm of true rest.

She's carrying something. Not in her hands but in her head. Something very heavy.

I close the notebook and set it aside.

From the top drawer, I remove a Montblanc pen—silver, elegant, and expensive. The one Aria gave me two years ago when my first book was published. The engraving catches the light:

To the one who spins stories from shadows – A

I turn it over in my fingers, feeling the weight of it, the perfect balance. It's a beautiful pen. I've always appreciated beautiful things.

I set it down beside my cheaper ballpoint—the one I actually use for writing. The Montblanc is too precious for everyday work. It stays in the drawer mostly, taken out only when I need to remember what it feels like to be seen, to be understood, to be loved.

I pick up the ballpoint and turn to the manuscript.

Chapter Eighteen – Doubt

Sarah can't sleep. The locket sits in her nightstand drawer, hidden beneath old receipts and forgotten batteries. She hasn't looked at it in three days, but she knows it's there and feels its presence like a physical weight.

David is the same as always. Kind. Attentive. Concerned about her health, her stress levels, her inability to let this case go. He brings her tea. He listens to her talk about dead women and paper cranes. He makes love to her with the same gentle patience he's always shown.

And she searches his face for signs of guilt while he sleeps.

This is what love does. it makes monsters of us all. Not through violence, but through the terrible things we're willing to overlook, the evidence we're willing to bury, the truths we're willing to deny.

Sarah knows this. She's a detective. She understands that the most dangerous person in any investigation is the one you trust completely.

But knowing doesn't change anything.

I pause, reading back what I've written. It's good. Honest. The kind of truth that only fiction can tell.

I continue writing for another hour, the words flowing easily. Chapter Eighteen becomes Chapter Nineteen. The story unfolds the way it always does one word at a time, one sentence building on the last, the architecture of narrative rising from the blank page.

By noon, I've written 3,000 words. My hand aches pleasantly, and my mind feels clear.

On the corner of my desk sits a small stack of origami paper pale squares I keep for when I need to think, when the noise in my head becomes too loud and I need my hands to do something, anything, to quiet it.

I take a sheet. White. Pristine.

The folds come automatically. Valley fold, mountain fold, reverse fold, petal fold. My hands know the way even when my mind is elsewhere. Fold the square in half diagonally. Fold the corners to the center point. Lift and squash. Narrow the legs from the head.

A crane emerges. Perfect. Symmetrical. Wings spread as if caught mid-flight.

I set it on Aria's side of the desk, the side she never uses but that I keep clear for her anyway, in case she ever wants to sit with me while I work.

She'll notice it eventually. Today, tomorrow, next week. And she'll wonder, was it here all along, or did I just make it? Is it a gift, or a message?

The beauty of ambiguity is that it tells the truth while lying perfectly.

My phone buzzes. A text from my agent:

Signing tomorrow night at Lighthouse Books. 7 PM. Don't forget! They're expecting a big turnout.

I reply with a thumbs up and set the phone aside.

Book signings are part of the job. Smile for photos, personalize inscriptions, answer the same questions about inspiration and process and where ideas come from. I'm good at it—the performance of being a successful author, approachable and grateful and suitably humble.

No one will notice the small cut on my thumb. No one ever does.

I wonder what Aria is doing right now. Probably reviewing evidence, building timelines, searching for patterns. Detectives and writers aren't so different we both look for the story hidden in the chaos, the narrative thread that makes sense of senseless things.

The difference is that detectives search for the truth.

Writers create it.

I return to my manuscript, but the words have dried up. That happens sometimes the well runs empty, and pushing only makes it worse.

Instead, I open my research folder. Crime scene photos, autopsy reports, FBI profiles of serial offenders. All public records, all legally obtained. Research for the novel. Any writer of crime fiction does the same.

The Origami Killer case is fascinating from a narrative perspective. The signature, the lack of sexual assault, the careful staging of the bodies it all suggests a perpetrator who's more interested in aesthetics than violence, in meaning rather than mere murder.

In my novel, the killer is a former art teacher whose students all died in a fire he caused accidentally. Now he recreates them in death peacefully arranged, and perfected. Each victim represents a student he couldn't save.

It's fiction, of course. But good fiction always touches the truth somewhere.

I close the folder and look out the window.

The day has brightened. Clouds are breaking up, letting through shafts of pale sunlight. People are going about their lives—working, eating, loving, dying. The great machinery of existence grinding forward, indifferent to individual suffering.

Somewhere in the city, Aria is hunting a killer.

And somewhere, a killer is planning his next move.

I pick up the crane I made and hold it to the light. The shadows it casts are surprisingly complex, geometric, angular, nothing like a real bird at all.

But that's the point, isn't it?

Origami isn't about recreating reality. It's about transforming it into something cleaner, simpler, more perfect than it ever was in life.

I set the crane down gently and return to my work.