“Your math is wrong,” Tomek said, and there was something flat and tired in his tone, like a man who had expected this exact moment and had prepared nothing for it. He pulled the folded paper from his pocket — his paragraph from the original note — and smoothed it on the armchair cushion. “Read it again. Actually read it.”
Priya crossed the room and picked it up. She read it once, then again. The paragraph about Tomek described a man who had recently received a diagnosis he hadn’t shared with his family, who had been driving to a clinic in St. Paul every other Thursday for six weeks, who had told no one because he didn’t know how. She set the paper down carefully.
“Tomek,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said. Which was probably not true, but was not the point.
The point was that whoever had written these paragraphs had not gathered information from within the group. They had gathered it from outside. From surveillance. From proximity. From weeks, possibly months, of quiet, patient watching. This was not a prank. It was a demonstration.
The deputy arrived at half past two. She was younger than Priya expected, sharp-eyed, with the particular composure of someone trained to assess a room in the first four seconds of entering it. Her name was Vasquez. She read the notes, bagged them, photographed the mirror frame, and asked each of them the same set of questions in a slightly different order.
Then she asked who had recommended the house.
Silence moved through the room like cold air under a door.
Bastian had booked it. But he’d found it through a recommendation — a message in a group chat, from a contact he now described as a colleague, someone he’d met at a conference in Chicago eight months ago. A man named Roman. Quiet, well-dressed, very knowledgeable about the lake country up here. Had sent the listing with a personal note: *Perfect for a small group. Peaceful. Private.*
“And you’re in contact with this Roman?” Vasquez asked.
“Was,” Bastian said. “He left the company about a month after the conference. I haven’t heard from him since.”
Vasquez typed something into her phone. Her expression didn’t change, which told Priya more than an expression would have.
The deputy left with the notes and a promise to follow up. The four of them sat in the kitchen while the afternoon light flattened and turned grey. Priya made fresh coffee. Nobody talked much. The threat felt like it had shifted — not closer, exactly, but more defined, more deliberate. Someone had engineered this weekend. Had pointed them here like a finger.
But why?
It was Zofia who found the answer, and it was not the answer any of them had been building toward.
She had been going through her phone — specifically the 2 a.m. call referenced in her paragraph, the one she’d made from her bathroom. The call was listed in her log as a number she didn’t recognize. She had assumed at the time it was a wrong number, a misdial, and had ended the call after a few seconds of silence. But now she looked at the number more carefully, and she looked at the contact list Bastian had shown her from his group chat, the message thread with Roman.
The number Roman had used to message Bastian was the same number that had called Zofia at 2 a.m.
She said this out loud. Slowly. Like she was reading from a language she was still learning.
Bastian went very still.
Because Bastian had never told Roman about Zofia. He had never mentioned her name, her number, or the fact that she existed. He and Zofia had only been together for four months. Their relationship wasn’t public. He hadn’t introduced her to colleagues. He was careful about that — careful in a way that now felt, in hindsight, like a premonition.
“How did he know about me?” Zofia asked.
And then Tomek, who had been quiet for a long time, said: “Because it’s not about you. It’s about him.” He was looking at Bastian. “Roman isn’t watching all of us. He’s watching Bastian. We’re just the proof. He needed Bastian to see how deep it goes.”
The room took a moment to catch up with that.
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