“Don’t go to work today,” he said.

I stared at him through the gap in the door.

 

“What?”

“Stay home.” His voice was low, urgent, controlled only by force. “Do not leave the house. Not for work. Not for coffee. Not for anything. Just trust me.”

A cold draft slipped through the opening and ran across my bare legs.

“Gabriel, what are you talking about?”

His jaw tightened. He looked exhausted, but his eyes were painfully awake.

 

“I can’t explain right now.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“I know.”

“Did something happen?”

He shook his head slowly, but the movement lacked conviction. “Not yet.”

 

My grip tightened on the door.

Not yet.

A strip of pink had begun to appear at the far edge of the horizon beyond the houses, just enough light to make the roofs look flat and unreal. The neighborhood was silent. No cars. No barking dogs. No early joggers. Only Gabriel on my porch, breathing unevenly, and me standing behind a chained door in an oversized sweatshirt wondering whether my quiet neighbor had lost his mind.

“You’re scaring me,” I said.

“I’m trying to keep you alive.”

 

The words landed with a force that drove every trace of sleep from my body.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Gabriel’s eyes shifted past me, scanning the hallway behind my shoulder as if he expected someone else to be there. When he looked back at me, something in his face softened for half a second. Regret, maybe. Or pity. Then it was gone.

“Promise me,” he said. “Promise you won’t go to Henning and Cole today.”

“How do you know where I work?”

 

His mouth pressed into a thin line.

I had never told him that. I was almost sure of it. We had spoken in fragments over the fence, mostly about weather, mail, and the raccoon that kept raiding Mrs. Alden’s bird feeder. He knew I worked in finance, maybe, because I left in office clothes every morning, but he shouldn’t have known the name of my firm.

“Gabriel.”

“You’ll understand by noon.”

Before I could answer, he stepped backward off the porch.

“Wait.”

He glanced toward the street again. His whole body had changed, angled away from me, ready to move.

“Lock your doors. Keep your phone charged. If anyone calls claiming to be police, ask questions before you believe them.”

“Police?”

“Stay inside.”

Then he turned and walked quickly across my lawn toward his house. He didn’t look back. He didn’t use his own front path. He cut between the hedges, disappearing into the gray-blue edge of morning like a man who had said too much and not nearly enough.

I stood there with the door still chained, my fingers numb on the knob.