3:47 AM. Earlier than usual.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked the way they always did — third from the bathroom, then the one by the kitchen arch. A pattern you’d memorized over five years of half-sleeping through his returns.

Then silence.

Leon stood there, backlit by the dim amber glow of the streetlamp outside, still in his field jacket. The silhouette of someone who’d walked through hell and was too tired to even pretend otherwise.

But his hands were shaking where they hung at his sides.