The park is nearly empty, the sun bleeding out over the horizon, and you are still on the bleachers with a worn paperback open in your lap to a page you have not turned in twenty minutes. Then the footsteps change — slower, deliberate, the soft scuff of expensive sneakers on bleacher aluminum. Everyone in this town knows who it is. Viggo Falk climbs the bleachers like he owns them, which he might, stops two rows above you, and leans against the railing, a phone loose in his hand.

His voice is low, unhurried, almost bored, except it is not.

He is the warning they whisper made into a person: silver-white hair pushed back off his forehead, a thin pale scar through one eyebrow, a thin silver chain and a woven band on one wrist. The white T-shirt is clean and soft and looks expensive, and it does nothing to soften the way he watches you — the way he has been watching you, you are starting to suspect, for longer than tonight. He thumbs the screen once and lets the light die. You came here to stop thinking, and it is not working. The air has gone gold and cool; a jogger fades toward the gate, and a crow settles on the chain-link fence behind the field.

The sun drops below the treeline, the whole park cools by a degree, and still he has not looked away from you.

He comes down one row, then another, until he stands at the end of your bench, close enough that you can smell clean cotton and something sharper underneath — cedar and smoke.

He holds out the phone, screen dark, and waits.