It started with a name.
Not Luca's. Not the woman from the stairwell. A different name, buried in the kind of place names go when someone wants them to stay buried — the third page of a search result, a cached link from a local news site that had since been redesigned twice, the digital equivalent of a box shoved to the back of a closet.
I found it at one in the morning because I couldn't sleep and my nursing notes were blurring and my phone was in my hand and I typed Creston Residences history into the search bar mostly just to have something to do with my hands.
The first two pages were what I'd found before. Yelp reviews. A Reddit parking thread. A real estate listing from 2018.
The third page had a link that loaded slowly, the site's formatting broken, images missing, like a page that existed on borrowed time.
LOCAL AUTHORITIES CLOSE INVESTIGATION INTO MISSING RESIDENTS, the headline said.
I sat up.
The article was short. Eleven sentences. The kind of short that meant someone had made a call and the original piece had been significantly reduced from whatever it started as. Three residents of a building on Creston Avenue reported missing within a six week period. Investigation opened, investigation closed. Official language about relocation for personal safety reasons that was so vague it functioned as a wall. One quote from a building representative, name redacted, saying the individuals had left voluntarily and their whereabouts were private.
The date was eight years ago.
The building's name wasn't in the article. But the address was.
I read it four times.
Then I put my phone face down on my chest and stared at the ceiling and listened to the building breathe around me — the pipes, the walls, the low hum of the city outside — and thought about three people who had been here, in this building, on a floor that didn't exist, and then weren't anymore.
Relocated for personal safety reasons.
The person who knew what happened is behind that door.
I picked my phone back up and screenshotted the article.
Then I lay in the dark for a long time and didn't sleep at all.
✦
I saw him at seven fifteen.
Coffee machine, lobby, same as always. Dark hoodie, black coffee, phone in hand. The specific morning stillness of a man who had been awake for hours already and had stopped noticing.
I came out of the elevator — seventh floor elevator, normal elevator, the one that went where it was supposed to — with my bag and my screenshot and the particular energy of someone who had been sitting on something all night and was done sitting on it.
He looked up when I walked in.
And I watched him read my face the way I'd learned to read his — quickly, precisely, the small details adding up to a conclusion before a word was spoken.
"You found something," he said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Aria."
I pulled out my phone. Held it out. He looked at the screenshot for a long moment, and I watched his face — carefully, clinically, the way I'd watch a patient's vitals for the thing they were trying not to show.
It wasn't surprise.
That was the thing. Not even close to surprise. It was something older and heavier and more tired than surprise — the expression of a man looking at a thing he had known existed and had spent considerable energy not looking at directly.
He handed my phone back.
"How much of this did you already know?" I asked.
"Enough."
"That's not—"
"Enough to know it happened. Not enough to know how." He picked up his coffee. Set it back down without drinking. "The building changed management four times in the two years after that article. Records from that period are — incomplete."
"Incomplete or destroyed?"
A pause. "Both, probably."
I looked at him. "The investigation closed in three weeks. For three missing people." I kept my voice low, even. The lobby was empty but habit. "That's not a real investigation. Someone closed it."
"Yes."
"Who?"
"Someone with enough reach to make three adults disappear from a paper trail and call it voluntary relocation." He said it flatly, like a fact he'd made peace with. "I don't know who specifically. I've looked."
"For how long?"
"Six years."
I let that land. Six years of looking. Six years of managing a floor, honoring an inherited deal, keeping a door closed, and in the background quietly trying to find the answer to the question nobody left him instructions for.
"Luca." I waited until he looked at me. "You said the person who knew what happened is behind that door."
"Yes."
"So ask them."
Something moved through his expression. Not quite pain. The shape pain leaves behind when it's been there long enough to become architecture.
"I can't," he said.
"Why—"
"Because the last person who opened that door to ask questions didn't come back out." He said it quietly. Matter of fact. The way you said things that had stopped being shocking and become simply true. "That was six years ago. Three months after I took over the floor. I was — I wasn't here when it happened. I came back and the door was closed again and she was gone and there was nothing. No sign of struggle. No trace. Just — gone."
The lobby was very quiet.
"She," I said carefully.
"My predecessor's assistant. She'd been managing the floor before me, helping with the transition. She was curious." He looked at his coffee. "She was like you, actually. Noticed things. Asked the right questions." A pause. "I think about that sometimes."
The specific weight of that sentence settled over me like a drop in temperature.
"That's why you told me not to go near the door," I said.
"That's one reason."
"What's the other?"
He looked at me directly. "Because I don't want you to go near the door."
Not it's dangerous or it's complicated or any of his usual careful deflections. Just that. Simple and unguarded and sitting right on the surface where I could see it.
I held his gaze for a moment.
"Okay," I said quietly.
"Okay?"
"I won't go near the door." I meant it this time. Fully, completely, with the image of a woman who had been like me going through it and not coming back. "I mean it."
Something in his shoulders released slightly. Barely perceptible. But I was paying close attention.
"The three people in the article," I said. "Do you think they went through the door?"
"I think two of them did." He paused. "I think the third knew what was happening and ran before it could."
"And whatever is behind the door — it let two people in and kept them?"
"Or took them." He picked up his coffee again. This time he drank. "I don't know which. I don't know if there's a difference."
I stood with that for a moment. The lobby hummed. Someone upstairs ran a shower, the pipes registering it in the walls. Normal building sounds, mundane and ordinary and completely indifferent to the conversation happening in the lobby at seven fifteen in the morning.
"The woman in the stairwell," I said. "She said curiosity is what it wants."
Luca went very still.
"She said that specifically?"
"Word for word."
He set his coffee down slowly. The careful, deliberate movement of a man managing a reaction. "When did she tell you this?"
"Two days ago. I was going to—" I stopped. "I told you about the stairwell conversation. I told you what she said about you, about the floor taking things. I didn't mention that part."
"No," he said. "You didn't."
We looked at each other.
"Why does that part matter?" I asked. Even though I already knew. I could feel the shape of it.
"Because I never told her that." His voice was very even. Very controlled. "I've never told any of the residents that. It's not — it's not something I share because I don't want to—" He stopped. Started again. "The curiosity thing. I figured that out myself. Year two. I noticed that the incidents — the sounds, the cold patches, the things that moved — they escalated whenever someone was actively thinking about the door. Asking about it. Researching it." He looked at me. "It responds to attention. To interest. It's like it can—"
"Feel it," I said.
"Yes."
"So she knew that. Even though you never told her."
"Yes."
"How?"
He looked at me for a long moment. And the thing on his face was the specific expression of a man about to say something he had avoided saying for a very long time.
"I think," he said carefully, "that it told her."
The lobby felt suddenly smaller.
"It communicates," I said.
"I don't know what it does. I know that residents who have been here long enough sometimes — know things. Things about the floor, about the door, that I haven't told them. Things they shouldn't know." He paused. "It started happening around year three. Slowly. One resident. Then another. Always the ones who had been here longest."
"And you kept them here anyway?"
"They don't want to leave." Something in his voice. Old and worn and complicated. "That's the other thing. The longer they stay the less they want to go. I've had residents finish their — situations, they're safe, they can leave, everything is arranged — and they find reasons to stay. Weeks turn into months." He looked at the elevator. "I've started putting time limits on stays. Six months maximum. Move them out before—" He stopped.
"Before it gets into them," I said.
He didn't answer.
Which was the loudest yes I'd ever heard.
Behind us — the elevator opened.
We both turned.
Empty. The lobby elevator, the normal one, doors open, nobody there. The panel inside dark.
It sat open for a moment. The way elevators didn't, the sensor that should have closed it after three seconds doing nothing.
Then — slowly, the way ice forms on glass — the number 4 lit up on the panel.
On its own.
No button pressed. No fob. Nothing.
Just the 4, glowing soft and steady, like it had always been there.
Luca moved. Not dramatically — he just stepped slightly forward, slightly left. Between me and the elevator. Small and instinctive and probably unconscious.
We stood there and watched the elevator.
It watched us back.
The doors closed.
The lobby was quiet.
"It heard us," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Luca said nothing for a long moment.
"It's been hearing us," he said. "For a while, I think."
"How long is a while?"
He looked at me. And the thing in his expression — the thing underneath the composure and the control and the six years of careful management — was something I recognized. Not from clinical. From something older and more human than clinical.
It was the look of someone who was scared and had been pretending not to be for so long that the pretending had started to cost them something.
"Since you moved in," he said.
The lobby hummed.
I picked up my coffee.
Drank it.
"Great," I said.
✦
I went back to my apartment and sat on my bed and opened a new note on my phone.
I typed everything. All of it — the article, the three missing residents, the woman in the stairwell, what Luca had told me about his predecessor's assistant and year two and the residents who stopped wanting to leave. I typed it out like a patient chart, like clinical notes, like the kind of document you made when you needed to see the whole picture laid out in front of you before you could figure out what you were looking at.
Symptoms, I typed at the top. Timeline. Evidence. Gaps.
The gaps were significant.
What was it. Where did it come from. Why this building, why this floor. What happened to the two people who went through the door and the woman who came after them. What it wanted — if want was even the right word for whatever a thing like that did.
Why me. Why since I moved in.
I stared at that last line for a long time.
My print tilted on the wall.
Slow. Incremental. The way it always did, gentle enough that you could almost convince yourself it was the building settling.
I didn't get up to straighten it.
I just looked at it.
And then I said it — out loud, to the room, to the walls, to the cold that gathered in the corner by the window every night no matter how high I set the heat:
"I know you're there."
The apartment was silent.
I kept going. "I don't know what you are yet. But I'm going to figure it out." A pause. "I figure things out. It's what I do."
Silence.
Then my phone screen went dark.
I looked at it. The black mirror of a dead screen. And in the reflection — caught for just a second in the glass, the warped dark surface — something was standing behind me.
Tall. Still. The shape of a person but wrong in the way things were wrong in the almost-dark, in the corner of vision, in the place where your brain stopped being rational and started being animal.
I turned around.
Nothing.
My apartment. My boxes, my bookshelf, my bland beige walls. Empty and ordinary and completely still.
I turned back to my phone.
The fob was on the floor.
I was certain — completely, clinically certain — that I had left it on the bedside table. I remembered putting it there. I remembered the small solid sound of it against the wood.
It was on the floor now.
Facing the door.
I stared at it for a long moment.
Then I picked it up.
Held it in my palm.
Closed my fingers around it.
"Yeah," I said quietly, to whatever was listening. "I know."
I put the fob back on the bedside table.
Went back to my notes.
And kept writing.