Marcus doesn't call ahead. He just drives.
By the time he turns onto the street, the police have been and gone from the part of the routine that still needed him to be a stranger, and he can see, three blocks out, that this isn't going to be the quiet errand he told himself it would be; the tape first, yellow and indifferent, strung wrong-angled across a fence like it had been put up in a hurry by someone who had better things to be doing. Then the lights, still turning though there's nothing left for them to warn anyone about. Then the small crowd that gathers around tragedy the way water finds a drain, phones up, faces lit blue-white from below.
He almost turns the car around.
He doesn't, because Viktor is in the passenger seat, and Viktor has already seen it.
"That's—" Viktor doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. His whole body has gone rigid in the seat, hands pressed flat against his thighs the way hands go when they don't trust themselves to do anything else.
Marcus slows the car without meaning to. Some old instinct, decades deep, the reflex of a man who spent years walking toward scenes like this instead of away from them, notebook already halfway out of his coat pocket before he catches his own hand and stops it.
"You don't have to look," he says, low.
"I can't not." Viktor's voice comes out thin. "I know that address."
Marcus doesn't ask how. He's starting to understand, in the specific slow way understanding arrives when you don't want it to, that there isn't going to be a version of this night that doesn't require him to know things he'd rather not.
He pulls the car to the curb, half a block back, and they sit there for a moment, engine idling, both of them looking at a house lit up in colors houses aren't supposed to be lit up in.
That's when Viktor sees the paper.
It's caught against the base of the fence, snagged on the chain-link the way trash gets snagged everywhere, except it isn't trash; Viktor knows that before he's consciously registered why, the way you know a voice on the phone before it's said a full sentence. A single page, torn along one edge, fluttering weakly against the metal every time a breeze moves down the street. Even from here, even in bad light, even at this distance, the handwriting has a shape he'd know anywhere.
Small. Cramped. Corrections made in red, layered over the original blue ink like a second draft written directly on top of the first, no space between them, no mercy for the sentence that came before.
"That's hers," Viktor says.
Marcus follows his eyeline and goes very still.
"I know that handwriting," Viktor says again, quieter, like saying it twice might make it less true. "She used to — when I first came to stay with her, she gave me a notebook. Told me to write down what I noticed. Everything. Every day. And then she'd go through it after, and she'd correct it. Not spelling. The — the feeling of it. She'd cross out the parts where I sounded upset and write something calmer over it. She said upset wasn't information. She said it was noise getting in the way of the record."
Marcus's hands tighten on the wheel.
"She did that to you."
"She said it was a gift." Viktor's voice cracks slightly, the same crack that showed up on the phone at midnight, except there's something harder in it now, something that wasn't there a few hours ago. "She said most people go through their whole lives never learning how to see clearly. That she was teaching me to see clearly."
"That's not a gift, Viktor." Marcus says it carefully, the way you'd set something breakable down on a surface you don't fully trust. "That's a cage with very good lighting."
Viktor doesn't answer right away. He's still looking at the page on the fence, at the version of Delaney's handwriting that's out here now, in public, snagged on a stranger's property, evidence of something Marcus doesn't have a name for yet and isn't sure he wants one.
"Can we—" Viktor starts. "Can we see what it says?"
"No." Marcus says it fast, immediate, no deliberation in it at all. "That's not for us. That's for whoever's processing that scene, and it needs to stay exactly where it is until they get to it."
"But—"
"I know." Marcus's voice softens, but the answer doesn't. "I know you want to know what she was thinking. I understand that more than you'd guess. But some things you don't get to have just because you're standing close enough to see them. That page might be the reason they catch her faster. You reading it changes nothing except maybe contaminating something that could matter."
Viktor's jaw works. He nods, once, tightly, the nod of someone agreeing with a rule he hates.
✻ ✻ ✻
They sit there a while longer, engine idling, neither of them reaching for the door handle, both of them watching the same square of yellow tape shift slightly in the wind.
"Was there a boy in there," Viktor says finally. It isn't quite a question. "Is that — is someone —"
Marcus doesn't answer immediately. He's done this kind of silence before, professionally, the specific pause of a person deciding how honest to be with someone who is about to have their whole understanding of a person rearranged.
"I don't know for certain," he says. "But given the address she gave you. Given everything else tonight." He exhales. "I think it's very likely someone got hurt in a way that isn't fixable. Yes."
Viktor's breath goes ragged, once, and he presses the back of his hand hard against his mouth, like he's trying to physically hold something in.
"I called you." His voice comes out muffled, disbelieving of itself. "I called you and told you where she went and I still — I still let her leave the apartment with it. I saw the closet was open. I saw the space where it usually was. And I didn't — I just stood there."
"You called me." Marcus turns in his seat to actually look at him, full attention, the same attention he gave the phone at midnight. "You were the only person tonight who did something instead of nothing. You don't get to carry what happened after that call landed. That belongs to her, and only to her."
"You don't know that."
"I know exactly that." Marcus's voice hardens, not at Viktor, at the idea itself, like he's swatting something dangerous out of the air before it can land where it's aiming. "Because I've spent thirty years watching people decide, after the fact, that they should have somehow stopped something they had no actual power to stop. It's the cruelest math a person can do to themselves, and it's always, always wrong. You were nineteen and asleep in an apartment with a woman who'd already decided what she was going to do before you ever woke up. You didn't fail to prevent this. You weren't in a position to prevent this. Those are different sentences and I need you to understand which one is true."
Viktor doesn't answer. He's crying again, quieter than before, the kind of crying that doesn't announce itself, just leaks out at the edges while the rest of his face tries to hold a shape.
Marcus reaches over; not for the page on the fence, not for anything outside the car, and puts a hand briefly on his shoulder. Not fatherly, exactly. Something more careful than that, more earned, the gesture of a man who's had to learn how to offer comfort without offering false certainty along with it.
"We're not going in there," Marcus says. "There's nothing we can do for whoever's in that house right now except let the people whose job this is do their job. What we're going to do is find you somewhere safe to actually sleep, and in the morning, we're going to figure out, together, what happens to you next. Not what she planned for you. What you actually want."
Viktor looks at him, really looks, maybe for the first time all night, and something in his face shifts, some old architecture cracking slightly, the shape of a boy who has spent eleven weeks being edited finally hearing a sentence with no red pen anywhere in it.
"Okay," he says.
Marcus pulls the car away from the curb, slow, careful, and in the mirror, the last thing either of them sees is the page still moving against the fence, fluttering, unread, waiting for someone whose job it is to make sense of what it says.
Some things you don't get to have just because you're standing close enough to see them.