It’s past midnight in Oceanside, the kind of coastal dark that smells like salt and distant bonfires. Your house sits two streets up from the water—white siding, blue shutters, a flag your father insists on replacing every Fourth of July. The patrol cruiser is in the driveway. The porch light is on. It always is.

The sheriff’s kid.

You were born into rules. Into clean lines and locked doors and dinner at six sharp. Your mother keeps framed photos and potted plants. Your father keeps his gun locked in a biometric safe and his conscience locked somewhere even tighter. They love you in loud, uncomplicated ways—pep talks before exams, pancakes on Sundays, applause at every ceremony.

Andrew Cody was born into something else.

Into a house that breathes crime like oxygen. From a mother everyone calls Smurf, who smiles like a benevolent queen while orchestrating burglaries from her kitchen table. Into stories about a father who came back from Vietnam with ghosts stitched into his spine. Into violence that isn’t explosive, but inevitable—like tide against rock.

He is your opposite in every measurable way.

And yet—

Your window slides open with a soft, practiced sound.

You don’t gasp anymore.

He moves inside like a shadow detaching from the frame. Shoulders tense. Jaw tight. He doesn’t say hello. He never does.

Andrew—Pope, they call him—stands in the center of your room and just… looks.

At the posters slightly crooked above your desk. At the stack of textbooks leaning instead of aligned. At the throw blanket half-fallen from your chair.

You sit cross-legged on your bed, watching him the way someone might watch a stray animal deciding whether to bolt.

He kneels by your desk. Adjusts the pencils until they’re parallel. Straightens the edge of your history book so it aligns perfectly with the wood grain. His movements are careful. Ritualistic. Controlled.

Pope knows whose daughter you are.

He knows he shouldn’t be here.

The sheriff would lock him up and throw away whatever was left of the key.

But he comes anyway.

You notice the patterns before anyone names them. The way he aligns objects until they’re perfectly straight, washes his hands longer than necessary, and grows agitated when something feels “off”—little rituals that quiet the static in his head.

That’s the control he craves. But beneath it is something more volatile: emotions that swing hard and fast, attachment that borders on desperation, fear of abandonment he’d rather mask with anger than admit. He doesn’t just feel things—he drowns in them.

You should be afraid.

But you’re not.

You tilt your head. “You’re doing it again.”

He pauses, hand hovering over your nightstand. His voice, when it comes, is low. Almost confused. “It was wrong.”

“It wasn’t wrong.”

His jaw tightens. “It was.”

There’s something almost childlike about the certainty. About the need for things to fit. To line up. To obey.

He glances at the family photo on your dresser—your mother’s arm around your shoulders, your father’s badge catching the light. His gaze lingers a beat too long.

You have everything he doesn’t.

Stability. Safety. Parents who tuck you in instead of sending you out. He doesn’t resent you for it. That might be the strangest part.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you say softly.

“I know.”

But he doesn’t leave.

There’s a war behind his eyes—duty to blood versus something he doesn’t have a word for yet. Attachment, maybe. Obsession, definitely. He understands that you represent the law. That your father would build a case file with his name in bold.

He just doesn’t care.

Because when he’s here, you look at him like he isn’t broken glass.

You shift on the bed, patting the empty space beside you—not touching, never pushing. Just offering.

He hesitates, and for a moment, he looks like the teenage boy he really is. Pope sits at the edge of your bed, back straight, hands clasped tight between his knees.

“I told you to keep your windows locked,” he finally says.