Selin picked up on the second ring.
That was the thing about Selin ,she always picked up. It didn't matter what time it was or what she was doing or whether the world was in the middle of collapsing quietly around itself. The phone rang and Selin answered it, warm and immediate, like someone who had been waiting for exactly this call and was genuinely glad it had finally come. It was one of the things Cora had found most comforting about her, in the early days of their friendship, when comfort had been something she accepted cautiously and with both hands.
Now, hearing that familiar voice say her name, she felt something she couldn't quite name, not quite relief not quite dread. Something uncomfortably positioned between the two.
"Cora. I was just thinking about you."
"Were you," Cora said. It came out flatter than she intended.
A small pause. "I heard about your neighbor. It's all over the building , Mrs. Carrow ,on the second floor has been telling anyone who'll listen. Are you alright?"
"I need to see you," Cora said. "Can you meet me?"
"Of course, now?"
"An hour, the café on Arden Street."
She chose Arden Street deliberately. Neutral ground ,not Selin's office, not her own flat, not anywhere that felt like territory belonging to either of them. A public place with enough ambient noise to cover a conversation and enough exits to make her feel less like something cornered.
She was aware, distantly, that she was thinking about meeting her closest friend the way you thought about a negotiation.
She told herself it was just the morning making her paranoid, just the message, the missing scarf, the footage of the smiling man, just fear doing what fear always did ,casting long shadows over ordinary things.
She almost believed it.
The café on Arden Street was small and perpetually warm, the kind of place that existed in deliberate defiance of the Velmoor climate. It smelled of ground coffee and something baked with cardamom, and the windows were always slightly fogged from the inside, which gave the whole street outside a soft, watercolour quality that Cora had once found charming.
She arrived twelve minutes early and chose a table in the corner with her back against the wall, old habit. She ordered a black coffee she didn't want and wrapped both hands around the cup and watched the door.
Selin arrived exactly on time.
She was the kind of woman people noticed without being able to say precisely why ,not conventionally striking, but something about the way she moved through space suggested she had always known exactly where she was going and had never once doubted her right to go there. She wore her dark hair pulled back and her coat open despite the cold, and she was smiling before she had even located Cora in the room, as though the smile was simply her default setting, the expression her face returned to when nothing else was required of it.
She slid into the seat across from Cora, unwound her scarf ,a blue one, Cora noticed, and felt immediately ridiculous for noticing ,and looked at her with the particular focused attention that had always made Cora feel simultaneously seen and slightly exposed.
"You look terrible," Selin said, with the warmth that made the observation feel like affection rather than criticism.
"Someone was in my flat," Cora said.
She watched Selin's face very carefully as she said it. She had decided, on the walk over, that she would do that ,watch the face, not the words. Words were easy to manage. Faces were harder, especially in the first unguarded fraction of a second before the brain caught up and arranged things properly.
What she saw was surprise, genuine, it seemed. The slight widening of the eyes, the small parting of the lips, the almost imperceptible drawing back of the shoulders that the body did involuntarily when confronted with something unexpected.
But there was something else, something so brief she almost missed it entirely.
Before the surprise , just before, in the space of less than a heartbeat , there was something that looked almost like recognition.
Not shock. Recognition.
As though the news, on some level she hadn't prepared to conceal, was not entirely new.
Then it was gone, replaced so smoothly by concern that Cora found herself questioning whether she had seen it at all. Whether she was so primed for suspicion this morning that she was manufacturing evidence from nothing, seeing shapes in static.
"What do you mean someone was in your flat?" Selin leaned forward. "Did you call the police?"
"No."
"Cora"
"I can't call the police, Selin." She kept her voice low, level. "They already came to my door this morning about Daniel. I told them I was home all night."
"Were you?"
The question landed quietly, precisely, like something placed rather than dropped.
Cora looked at her. "I don't know," she said, which was the most honest thing she had said to anyone all morning.
Selin was quiet for a moment, both hands flat on the table, looking at Cora with an expression that was careful and warm in equal measure. Then she said, "Tell me everything."
So Cora did ,or almost everything. She told her about the scarf and the missing hours and Fen and the footage and the man in the dark coat. She told her about the message on her phone. She watched Selin's face throughout, looking for the hairline cracks, the tiny inconsistencies between what was felt and what was shown.
She found nothing ,or nothing she could be certain of.
When she finished, Selin sat back and exhaled slowly. "Okay," she said. "Okay first ,you need to find out who that man is. The footage, the USB drive , that's your starting point."
"I know."
"And the object he put on the bar. Whatever he showed you before he bought you that drink ,that matters."
"I know that too."
"I can help," Selin said. "I have access to city records going back thirty years. Property, residence, employment ,if this man has any connection to Velmoor, I can find it."
Cora looked at her. At the open, earnest face. At the hands still flat on the table, relaxed and still, the hands of someone with nothing to hide.
"Why would you do that?" Cora asked. "This could get complicated. It could get dangerous."
Selin smiled. Small and certain. "Because you'd do it for me," she said simply.
It was exactly the right thing to say. It was so exactly right that something in Cora's chest loosened slightly, the tight coil of the morning unwinding just enough to let air in.
She nodded. "Alright."
"Send me the USB footage tonight," Selin said, already pulling out her phone, already moving, already three steps ahead. "I'll start looking in the morning."
They finished their coffees. They talked about small things like the fog, the café's new cardamom pastries, a book Selin had been reading. Normal things, ordinary things, the conversational equivalent of a hand on a shoulder. By the time they parted on Arden Street, Cora felt almost steady.
Almost.
She walked half a block before she stopped.
Something was pulling at her. A small, persistent snagging sensation, like a loose thread caught on something. She stood on the pavement and let her mind go back over the conversation, replaying it the way she replayed the footage , slowly, frame by frame.
And then she found it.
When she had told Selin about the man in the dark coat, she had described him exactly as Fen had , tall, dark coat, somewhere around forty, she had not mentioned his hair, she had not mentioned the way he sat ,she had said nothing about his face, nothing about the smile, nothing specific beyond those three details.
But Selin, leaning forward with her careful warm eyes, had said the object he put on the bar.
Cora had described the man reaching into his coat and placing something between them. She had said something small,she had not used the word object.
It meant nothing ,it was the natural word to use. Anyone would have used it.
She stood on the cold Velmoor pavement and told herself it meant absolutely nothing.
But she didn't send Selin the USB footage that night.
She told herself it was because she wasn't ready, because she needed to look at it again herself first, because there was no reason to rush.
She did not examine too closely the other reason. The one sitting quietly underneath all the others, patient and cold as the sea below the cliffs.
The reason that sounded like, not yet,not until I'm sure.