Something crashed to the floor on the other side of the wall.

Evelyn flinched out of his memories just in time to hear a muffled female shout.

"I told you not to put it on the edge!"

A man's voice answered something unintelligible. Another impact followed, metallic this time, and then came the aggrieved clatter of dishes.

Evelyn slowly closed his eyes.

Judging by the sounds, the rolling pin had either fallen after all or been employed as the closing argument in a domestic dispute.

He had lived here long enough to learn his neighbors' schedules almost better than his own. Ms. Alvarez lived on the right — an elderly woman who turned her television on loudly at five-thirty every weekday morning. On the left was a married couple who discussed every household issue as though the fate of the country depended on the outcome. Upstairs, someone regularly moved furniture after midnight. Either they were still trying to arrange the apartment, or they were slowly and methodically burying a body under the floorboards.

Evelyn had not decided which.

The building had once been considered respectable. Then the old, spacious apartments had been divided into cramped studios, with remarkable thrift applied to the matter of soundproofing. The result was that every resident had a separate door, a private stove, a bathroom, and an almost complete understanding of their neighbors' personal lives.

Well.

He had chosen this.

Evelyn sighed, lifted his cup, and discovered that the tea had gone cold.

The cup was thin white porcelain with a narrow silver rim. One of two he'd taken from the city apartment along with a good teapot, a wool blanket, and several boxes of his father's papers. Against the cheap writing desk, it looked almost provocative.

So did the laptop sitting beside it.

Thin, expensive, enclosed in smooth metal, it looked among the simple furniture like an object from another era. Or at least another tax bracket.

The rest of the apartment was considerably less refined. A narrow bed against the wall. A small wardrobe that physically could not contain even half his clothes. Two mismatched chairs, one of which rocked in a vaguely dangerous manner. Worn parquet, a noisy radiator, and a kitchen faucet capable of dripping in several distinct rhythms. Neatly stacked boxes stood beneath the tall window, still waiting for Evelyn to work up the nerve to unpack them properly.

The apartment wasn't terrible.

It was temporary.

Evelyn reminded himself of that every time the radiator started knocking in the middle of the night or he had to decide which shirts could remain in the wardrobe and which went back into the suitcase under the bed.

He could not afford his old life right now.

Not because he had no money left. There was still money. With reasonable economies, enough for six months — especially now that he no longer maintained a car and, for the first time in his life, had begun noticing what transportation cost.

But returning to his mother, admitting defeat, and allowing the family trust to pay for every step he took again was more than his natural stubbornness and equally natural pride would permit.

His mother, of course, would call that foolishness.

Possibly with some justification.

She had offered to take him back during the very first week. Not asked. Not tried to persuade him. Simply informed him that his room was ready and the driver could collect his things whenever convenient. As though the decision had already been made and Evelyn merely needed to stop being ridiculous long enough to obey common sense.

For his university graduation, his mother had given him a silver sports car — fast, indecently expensive, and registered, naturally, through the family trust. When she made her offer, Evelyn had silently set the keys on the table.

A few days later, he'd rented this studio.

Sometimes Evelyn suspected that a significant portion of his adult life consisted of decisions made solely to prove to his mother that he could make them without her.

That was foolish too.

Still better than going back.

Something cracked on the other side of the wall.

"Don't tell me that was expensive!" the man exclaimed.

Evelyn looked toward the partition.

The rolling pin, evidently, had been expensive.

He took another sip of cold tea and turned back to the laptop.

Seven new emails waited in his inbox. Four advertisements, one bank notification, the electric bill, and an invitation to an interview.

The last had come from a small firm that handled artifact verification and insurance investigations. The position was almost identical to the one Evelyn had applied for a few days earlier: document analysis, registry work, written assessments, occasional field visits. The salary was acceptable. The office was in a decent neighborhood. The message politely invited him to choose a convenient time to meet.

Yesterday afternoon, Evelyn would have studied the company's website, its owners, and its recent cases with great care. Now he opened the email only so the notification would stop showing as unread, then closed it almost immediately.

His thoughts kept returning to Johnson & Associates.

More specifically, to its owner.

Evelyn looked at the phone beside his cup again.

The screen remained dark.

He was not waiting for a call. Mr. Johnson undoubtedly had other candidates, and he had been perfectly clear that he would make a decision later. Checking the phone every few minutes was pointless.

Evelyn understood that.

Which was why he waited nearly thirty seconds before checking again.

If Johnson called, fine. If he didn't, also fine.

The latter might even be preferable. More sensible. Safer for Evelyn's professional reputation and several other parts of his anatomy. He wanted the job and was simultaneously terrified that he might actually get it.

Annoyed, Evelyn opened a new tab and typed: Marcus Johnson. Johnson & Associates.

The search engine returned the same results he'd already seen. The agency address. Registration information. A few brief mentions in old newspaper reports. The job listing that had prompted Evelyn to send in his resume before realizing he might also, through sheer carelessness, be submitting his heart to a stranger's office.

He grimaced.

Disgusting phrasing.

Especially because it was not entirely inaccurate.

Nothing new appeared in the results. Nothing had the first time Evelyn researched his potential employer, either. Back then, the lack of information had seemed suspicious, though not suspicious enough to cancel the interview.

Now it was infuriating.

A man could not look like that and leave nothing online but a license number and two dry references in court reports. It violated some basic principle of fairness.

And Evelyn had barely slept the night before.

He had come home, showered, gone to bed, and spent the next several hours turning from side to side while methodically dissecting the interview one line at a time.

What he'd said. What he hadn't said. What he should have answered. When he should have kept his mouth shut. And he'd stared at Mr. Johnson so openly. Johnson had obviously noticed. Of course he'd noticed.

At some point Evelyn had buried his face in the pillow and groaned.

A minute later, he'd become offended by his own embarrassment.

Really. How could anyone expect a perfectly calm reaction from a person after locking him alone in an office with that kind of erotic catastrophe?

Mr. Johnson should have warned applicants in advance. Right there in the job listing, alongside the requirements.

Proficient with databases. Attention to detail. Resistance to abnormally attractive monsters over six feet tall.

Apparently Evelyn did not meet the last requirement.

A bright window suddenly burst across the bottom of the laptop screen.

HOT MONSTER GIRLS FROM THE LOWER QUARTER ARE WAITING FOR YOU!

An illustrated woman with purple skin winked and ran a forked tongue over her lips.

Evelyn clicked the X in irritation.

It moved to the opposite corner.

"Of course," Evelyn muttered.

The second attempt finally closed the ad, though not before it offered to show him which single women from rare lineages were currently within two miles.

Evelyn pushed away from the desk with a scrape and leaned back in his chair.

For a moment, the situation amused him.

If anyone had told fourteen-year-old Evelyn that at twenty-eight he would be genuinely irritated by banners promising him hot women, he would have laughed in their face.

His parents' house had a network filter. His mother called it a reasonable security measure. His father called it a way to avoid explaining too early why people took their clothes off in front of cameras on the internet.

Naturally, that only made forbidden material more desirable.

By then, Evelyn already knew that pulling one's trousers down could be used for more than shocking relatives or writing obscene words in the snow behind the house. But theoretical knowledge only sharpened his curiosity.

An opportunity presented itself when the family changed internet providers. A technician spent several hours working on the equipment, the filter went offline, and Evelyn's parents were occupied with a conversation downstairs.

Evelyn moved quickly.

As quickly as a teenager could reasonably move after receiving unrestricted access, for the first time in his life, to a website with a black-and-orange logo and more categories than his imagination had accounted for.

He watched a lot.