Page 40 of Paws & Order

Cassian looks relieved and faintly betrayed all at once, as if hungry ghosts had been a legitimate contender but are now demoted to minor inconvenience.

“Maybe we wait on the tulip,” Cassian says, studying the blue petals through the evidence bag. “Some of the older blooms react to sunlight.”

I watch him study it with a forensic kind of awe, eyebrows knit, thumb brushing at a smudge on the plastic.

The tenderness in it—the way he’s careful not to break even a strange little thing meant for dying—makes something small and reckless root in my chest.

He glances up.

Our eyes meet.

And just for a second, we’re not the police chief and the mayoral assistant.

Not haunted and professional.

We’re two people in a kitchen at an awkward hour, surrounded by ghosts and sugar.

I’m the first to look away.

That’s usually how this goes.

Morning barely counts as morning when you spend it rereading the same three emails and hoping for a supernatural update.

I busy myself with my inbox, but the Bay crew is running on yesterday’s outrage, and the only messages are from vendors confirming tablecloth colors for a spring fair I’m too frazzled to think about.

Cassian sits at the kitchen table, phone on silent, reading the same old incident reports and not pretending otherwise.

The lines at the corners of his mouth say he’s worrying at the problem like a puzzle box, refusing to accept defeat just because the last piece is missing.

In the absence of new ghost activity, I clean.

Not out of panic or maternal instinct.

Because motion is my only shot at feeling in control.

Cassian lets it ride, only intervening when I start to alphabetize the contents of the refrigerator door.

“You’re spiraling,” he says, voice low but not unkind.

I wipe a streak of lemon oil across the counter.

“I could be preparing. Isn’t that what you would do on your own turf? Build a nest, lay in supplies, check the exits?”

He gives me a look that could pierce granite.

“Are you expecting a siege?”

I want to say no, but the truth hitches higher in my throat.

“I keep thinking… if the gifts are stepping up, what’s next?”

I wave a hand at the tulip, the note, and the neat array of artifacts on the table: the hairpin, the coin, the copper spiral, the pastry neither of us bought.

“It’s like he wants to be noticed. Or remembered. Maybe both.”

“He?”

Cassian’s voice catches on the word with a subtle, dangerous weight.