Episode 32 — Whispers Between Walls
POV: Ethan Marshall
When Layla left for her seminar that morning she kissed my temple the way she always did—soft, quick, an arrangement of affection that steadied me more than I expected. The kiss sat at the base of my skull like something warm and private. I watched her walk down the hall and thought, briefly, about how smallordinary things had become our refuge: the tilt of her smile, the way she tucked hair behind her ear when she read, the way she clenched her notebook when she was nervous. Those small things had gravity now, and I guarded them with the kind of stubbornness that had not belonged to me before.
I went to the car with a list of errands and a head full of company paperwork I couldn't escape—Gregory's people had already sent three memos since last night, a thin drum of reminders about image and timing. I responded to two, left one unread. Policies and optics could be handled; Layla could not be replaced by a press release. The choice in front of me was clear even if the path to execution was messy: keep her safe without making her life smaller.
Marcus had pinged early, a clipped message that was half-business and half-friend: "quiet sweep tonight. Chloe on ground. Mia sketching angle. No alarm. Move calm." He had a way of translating urgency into ledger lines; it calmed me because it meant he was working, and if Marcus was working then something coherent was being built around us.
I parked near the library and walked in with a slow sort of attention that made the fluorescent lights brittle. Classes were humming; students moved in predictable orbits. I kept my phone face-down in my pocket and tried not to be the kind of man who let his world narrow to the edge of one girl's silhouette. But the truth was that my world had narrowed, and it felt right.
The first note wasn't a note at all. It was a folded corner of paper tucked under the picket fence that ringed the fountain—an almost-servile gesture left where someone thought I might pass. I didn't find it; Chloe did, seconds before I reached the spot. She held it out with that practiced casualness of hers, a grin that didn't reach her eyes.
"Found this on my way to the steps," she said, and the way she said it told me she had already typed Marcus a line. "Looks like someone left it just for you."
The paper was ordinary—sketchbook weight, torn from a spiral. At first I thought it was a simple drawing: charcoal lines, quick, confident strokes. Then I recognized the subject: my hand, mid-gesture, the small curl of my ring finger that always found its place against Layla's wrist. The drawing was intimate in the language of lines. Someone had observed a private motion and rendered it like evidence.
Beneath the sketch, in cramped ink, a single sentence: you looked different today.
It read like both a fact and a taunt. Whoever had written it watched closely enough to notice small changes—my slowness at breakfast yesterday, the way I had paused at the terrace—but not close enough to show me their face. The not-seen made everything worse.
I felt something cold and deliberate settle in my chest. Chloe's fingers tightened around her coffee cup.
"We'll bag it," Marcus said over my shoulder. He had been standing near the old elm, laptop tucked under his arm like a shield. His expression was bruised into focus. "JPG capture, header pull, check camera arc. Don't touch the paper until IT images it."
I slid the note into a thin evidence envelope Marcus produced with an efficiency I'd come to trust. He worked with the same movement he used on servers and email trails—no flourish, just a steady, practical competence. He didn't speculate. He methodized.
"You don't think it's a prank?" Chloe asked. Her voice carried the kind of forced philosophy people adopt to keep fear from curdling into hysteria.
"If it's a prank," Marcus said, pausing, "it's a very invested one." He looked at me then, and there was a small, private notebook of calculations behind his eyes. "We'll route this through IT. Leave a trace. And tell Layla nothing until we know what we're dealing with."
I wanted to tell Layla everything in the same breath. I wanted to hand her the paper and say, Look—someone is watching. But Layla was fragile in ways that had nothing to do with her strength. She tightened around fear. Marcus's method felt right: keep her safe by containing what she didn't need to carry. I nodded.
Marcus's team—an uneven roster of campus IT and a graduate student who owed him favors—moved quickly. By the time I took my seat in Dr. Holloway's lecture hall the note was documented, scanned, catalogued. Marcus sent me a short update: IMAGE SECURED. ROUTE TRACE START. CHLOE STANDING BY. His texts were surgical and left me both reassured and raw with the knowledge that men with laptops could not always hold back people who wanted to make headlines.
Class blurred in and out. Professor Holloway spoke about cognitive mapping and the ways people encode ordinary gestures into meaning. I couldn't focus beyond the fact that someone had taken an ordinary motion—my hand resting on Layla's wrist—and made it into a study-track. It felt obscene in the way it fixed us to the limelight.
The second incident happened before lunch. I was halfway down the corridor near the psychology department when a folded leaflet fluttered at my foot like a small bird. I stooped to pick it up and found a tiny folded drawing inside. It was Layla's silhouette, sketched from the angle of the bench near the fountain where she often read—hair tucked, head down, shoulders wrapped in a sweater. The sketch captured private weight: the curve of her jaw as she read, the exact slope of one shoulder. On the back, another line: you were smiling at him.
I slowed so the air felt viscous. Someone had followed gestures across two scenes, building a private archive of our life and then distributing it like a rumor wrapped in paper.
I folded the leaf into my palm and looked up. A girl with a mop of paint-stained hair and a sketchbook under her arm glanced my way and then away. For one terrible second I considered approaching, mythic fury rising in my chest, but I kept my mouth buttoned and my jaw soft. Confrontations could be spectacles. Spectacles fed the engine that someone wanted.
I crossed the quad to find Layla in the seminar room as if it were a mercy to see her sitting calmly with her notebook, as if nothing had been left in our wake. She looked up and smiled, her eyes making an honest door between us.
"Hey," she said, as if my sudden pale was the natural color of the day. She closed her notebook when she saw me and gave me that small, patient look—Layla's way of slowing everything into a space you could breathe in.
"I'll drive you to the art studio later," I lied, because Marcus had asked to keep her away from public routes for a few hours and the lie felt like an invisible hand around her wrist. "I have something in the city to take care of."
She touched my arm. "You look tense." The observation was gentle, almost accusatory in the sweetest way. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." I let the words be a promise and meant them. I could sense her worry like a tide and wanted to be the harbor. "Tell Chloe I'll be back by dinner."
She nodded and returned to the seminar like a person settling down to a book. I watched her for as long as the doorway allowed and then walked away with Marcus's note scanning across my palm.
The first pattern I tried to establish—who benefits—was instinctive. There were only a few groups who could gain from making Ethan Marshall's life messy: my father's rivals, campus gossip, or someone with very personal motives. The first two possibilities were political and raw; the third was intimate and dangerous. I had no appetite for categorizations that made Layla's life collateral.
Marcus met me outside the seminar with a new set of lines on his screen. He'd pushed a coffee in my hand without asking. He was thinner lately, and he rubbed at the bridge of his nose in that particular way that told me he'd been sleeping badly.
"Two things," he said. "First: the paper is clean of prints but we have image layer data from the scan. Someone used a phone with a custom camera app that strips GPS. Not an amateur move. Second: we have a handle cluster. They're not big accounts—throwaways—but they interact in the same micro-communities: an art zine group, a local printing crew, and—this is the weird part—an online account that posts... compositions. Poems and drawings. Obsessive little posts about hands."
The mention of hands made my jaw tighten. "Hands?"
"Yeah." He tapped keys. "Someone literally posts sketches of hands touching other hands and writes lines like 'the fold when palms rest is personal'. It's child-of-obsession writing. We flagged the account. It hops nodes, but it keeps returning to the same visual crop signature."
My stomach answered with a slow, hot wave. "Are you thinking this is a single person?"
Marcus didn't smile. "Yes."
"Female?"
"Probably." He met my eyes as if weighing a private file. "Based on voice on a few voiceposts we scraped, and cross-indexing with small community rosters—artists, layout volunteers—there's a likely match. We can dig a little deeper, but I want to stress: don't change your routine publicly. Don't give them angles. Let Chloe and Mia keep watching without showing signs you're aware."
I had the urge to do the opposite—to tell Layla, to drag her into a solution. Instead I nodded. Marcus's caution was tactical and right. I promised him nothing out loud and everything inwardly. I promised Layla that I would set a fence around her and then break my own hands making the fence impenetrable.
The day stretched, a thin procurement of rituals. I sent two messages to Gregory that read public-safe and beneath them a private reply to Marcus that said: BRING ME THE HANDLE. Marcus answered with three words: ALREADY ON IT.
At two in the afternoon Chloe texted an image. A small, quick snapshot of a corner table at Adel's bookshop—Adel the proprietor who sold paper at the backstreet and who printed zines for the campus collective. In the picture, a paper cup, a pressed flower, and on the table's edge a folded pamphlet with the same signature crop. The folded pamphlet seemed to be placed deliberately, a visual breadcrumb left where someone meant it to be found.
Chloe's note read: "She's back there sometimes. Mia said she saw her yesterday with a red umbrella. Juno mentioned a woman folding pamphlets 'like she was cataloguing faces.' Mia says Juno sketches people. I'm on it."
Mia. Juno. Names that now populated Marcus's tentative map. Juno, the printer's assistant from the bookshop; Mia, Layla's roommate and the observant one who sketched between classes; Chloe, the bloodstream of gossip and yet the line of defence. Each of them was small and intimately plugged into the social wiring of this campus. They were the right kind of people to notice minor aberrations—a red umbrella, an unlocked terminal—and not overreact.
By late afternoon Marcus had more: a throwaway IP hop traced toward the shop's public terminal, a list of accounts that had shared the same cropped imagery, timestamps that matched the nights we had been out. The trace was not a closed loop but a hinge. He mapped it for me like a man designing an archer's bow.
"There's another detail," he said. "The uploader—wherever they post—keeps cropping the left skyline. That prevents matching the mural visible on the back path. But their crop leaves a sliver of building that we can still match to the shop row. It's sloppy in an artful way. They want to be found at a distance but not pinned. Obsessive, not careless."
Obsessive. The word felt small and huge at once. I imagined a person cataloguing gestures in a notebook, matching the cadence of our days into a private scrapbook. Whoever this was collected the fragments of us and made a collage. The thought of that—someone stitching our details into their story—made my stomach roll.
That night, after I walked Layla back to her dorm and kissed her hand in the hall like a simple miracle, I sat with Marcus in the car and watched the campus become something else in the dark. The lights looked as if the day had softened into a memory. Marcus's laptop glowed between us like a small altar.
"We'll go public if we have to," he said quietly. "But the first reveal has to be owned by us—evidence first. We can't let them make it a spectacle. Spectacles feed them."
I thought of Gregory's worried lines and the public dinner last week. I thought of how men like my father read headlines like scripture. I thought of how those headlines could become instruments, and I thought of something else: that the one who'd left my hand drawn and Layla's silhouette folded was not interested in headlines in the way a campaign manager is; they wanted something tighter, a kind of possession.
"Do you think she knows who Layla is?" I asked.
Marcus's jaw worked. "I don't know. She knows you. That's clear from the gestures. Whether she thinks Layla is an obstacle or a component of whatever story she's telling—no verdict yet. But she watches interactions. She's treated you both like materials to rearrange."
Material. That word felt brutal and clinical. I wanted to punch into the world and rip out the pages where she had written our motion down. Instead I planned. Plans were the tools of people who wanted to rewrite fate into something less cruel.
I drove home with the engine quiet, the city sliding past like a receding film. Layla texted me a photograph of the seminar notes she'd taken, a doodle in the margin of our initials folded into a heart. I looked at it and felt something like a vow tighten in my chest. Whoever watched us would find me in the way they did not expect: relentless, patient, and far worse at being kind than they thought.
Before sleep I texted Marcus: NEXT STEP. He replied: INTERVIEW BOOKSHOP TOMORROW. KEEP LAYLA ROUTINE UNCHANGED.
I wanted to tell her, to break the quiet apart and hand the worry back to the world. Instead I slid my phone under the pillow, turned toward the part of the bed where Layla's presence still lingered in the scented fabric of the pillowcase, and held steady to the promise I'd already made in my head: we would meet this thing alive, together, and when it came down to it I would be the kind of man who did not let the people who loved him become footnotes in someone else's obsession.
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