House hunting is hard when you're the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control.

It wasn't that Trench didn't have help—Darling had taken to combing listings like it was a side project, keeping him up at all hours of the night with increasingly enthusiastic possibilities. ("This one has two bathrooms and original crown molding. Two, Zach!") It wasn't even that the options were bad. Some were fine. A few were good. But time was a rare thing, and Trench was still trying to figure out how to divide it between leading a secretive, reality-bending government agency and navigating the slow implosion of his personal life.

So he did what he could, when he could.

Most mornings started early. He'd walk through the static-bright corridors of the Oldest House, drinking Bureau coffee that tasted faintly of ozone and regret, and try to finish his paperwork before the building reconfigured itself again. Some afternoons, if things were calm—relatively speaking—he'd sneak out under the guise of "external research." Darling covered for him more than once, cheerfully lying to security with a straight face and a suspicious stain on his lab coat.

"I'm fairly sure no one believes me," Darling confessed one Thursday, after Trench returned from touring a Tudor-style duplex that smelled aggressively of lavender. "But I do it for the narrative consistency."

By mid-May, Trench had seen seventeen places.

He picked the brownstone on a rainy Tuesday.

It was tucked on a quiet street lined with trees that hadn't yet given up their blossoms, the kind of block where kids left chalk drawings on the sidewalks and someone always forgot to bring in their recycling bins. Three stories. Brick façade. Modest backyard. Enough space for Susanna to have her own room, plus a little reading nook under the stairs where she could build blanket forts and name the dust bunnies.

It wasn't flashy, but it felt… stable. Human.

The price was high, but his salary could handle it. Bureau pay had its perks, though most of them couldn't be spent outside the building. Still, it was closer to the House than his place in the suburbs. Fewer hours in traffic. More time with Susanna, depending on the custody schedule once the lawyers stopped dragging their feet.

He imagined her there. Crayons on the kitchen table. Wet boots in the front hall. A laugh echoing up the stairwell.

He signed the papers that Friday.

When he told Darling, the man hugged him unceremoniously and immediately offered to help paint. ("I do a very good 'Haunted Birch'—it's a shade of gray, I swear.")

Trench moved in slowly, boxes arriving in bursts between Bureau briefings and late-night phone calls with Kate. There were still things to sort—furniture, logistics, emotions—but standing in that quiet, echoing space, with dust motes drifting through the late afternoon light, he felt something loosen in his chest.

Maybe not freedom. Not quite peace.

But something close.

Something like a beginning.