The shady neighborhood keeps its truths like a miser keeps coins: close, catalogued, dispensed when least expected. I couldn't resist it because it promised fragments—an overheard confession at a bus stop, a scrap of laughter behind a boarded-up storefront, a photograph slipped under a door. Each fragment was a door I hadn't known I owned. Walking home, the fog thinned and the lamps seemed less crooked, but the pulse remained, steady as a reminder: some places don't want to be solved. They want you to keep coming back.