Your average person might’ve been completely oblivious to the fact that they were being followed, but Isaiah was perceptive enough to notice the tell-tale signs. The first thing that tipped him off was his intuition, that weird feeling you get when you notice someone behind you who’s keeping their distance far too deliberately, pacing just slowly enough to never overtake you but briskly enough to keep up. Once this feeling repeated several days in a row, Isaiah began to test his suspect by speeding up or slowing down during his walks. Whenever he ran to reach a tram station in time, or decelerated after feigning pain in his legs, he took careful notice of the behavior of the potential stalker. Indeed, the man would always react adequately, so as not to lose or go past him. A few times, Isaiah deliberately strayed from his regular path – he would make sure to ask a stranger for directions, making it seem like he was your regular transplant still unacquainted with the city. After all, there was the possibility that he was simply dealing with someone whose daily route just happened to be nearly identical to his. That the man would always follow Isaiah down these diversions strongly suggested that something more insidious was at play.

Crucially though, it was easy for Isaiah to recognize the stalker because he was terrible at following. The way he always maintained a nearly constant distance from his subject was too glaring to overlook. He didn’t put much effort into changing his appearance day-to-day. And he was stupidly persistent. After maybe a week of stalking, anyone would conclude that Isaiah had a predictable daily routine – go to the Archive, then to a doctor’s appointment or home. There would’ve been no point in following him after that, and yet the man stuck to it for weeks. If there was an intent to steal or do physical harm, surely he would’ve acted on it as soon as possible. But no, he was just following. More than anything else, it was just annoying.

One day near the end of his information gathering, Isaiah decided to confront the stalker. While on his regular walk home from the Archive, he made an unexpected detour into a side street, slipping out of view of his pursuer for a moment. He then waited right around the corner for the hapless tracker to make the same turn. It didn’t take long for him to appear. He was clearly expecting to see Isaiah further down the street: he let out an audible gasp of shock when he realized he was suddenly standing face to face with the person he was supposed to hide his presence from.

“Can I help you?” Isaiah said calmly. He was looking at a man not much older than himself wearing a tweed jacket with elbow pads. He obviously wasn’t quick on his feet when caught red-handed, since all his lips could muster was a nervous torrent of meaningless syllables.

“Let me make this easier on you. I’m almost certain that you’ve been following me for the past few weeks. You can deny it, in which case you’ll have to explain to me why I see you behind me every day without fail. Or you can skip the embarrassment and just tell me why. What’ll it be?”

The man swallowed hard. Now that Isaiah could observe his face closely, he recognized him immediately.

“Bax,” Isaiah said. “Milton Bax?” he pressed on.

He nodded his head somewhat reluctantly.

“When I came to the HQ, you made it clear that you wanted no part in whatever I was doing. So why have you been following me all this time then?” Isaiah asked.

“I…” Milton mumbled. “I’m sorry. But, when you left, and I gave it some thought… I want to find out what happened to Milo… to my uncle.”

“Why did you deny that you were related to him when the chief asked you?” Isaiah said.

“I don’t know. I guess I just did it instinctively. Because I’ve never actually seen Milo in my life, not even once. So it doesn’t really feel like he’s a part of my family. I told you, I know nothing about him. I think my father knows, but he doesn’t want to tell me. It feels like he’s… ashamed of his brother.”

“You don’t know anything about your uncle, and you wish to remedy that – this, I understand,” Isaiah started. “The part where you’re stalking me – that, I don’t understand.”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” he mumbled, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s just… I saw you come in that day, and you’re pretty much a hero for everyone in the division. And the way you talked to the chief, so confident… I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.”

“In my experience, that tends to be a polite way to say you were eavesdropping,” Isaiah said.

He let out yet another defeated “sorry”, then continued with a withering voice. “I’ve… I’ve never been like you. Actually, I’m the opposite of you. I’ve been in the force for nearly five years now, but I’ve never accomplished anything worth praising. I’m just… there. Sitting at my desk, filling in forms, waiting for the day to pass so I can go home.”

“But then when you came,” he continued, “and told the chief about what you were trying to do, I thought to myself ‘this could be something big.’ I thought that maybe, if I followed you, I could be a part of it. Not only discover what happened to my uncle… but also achieve something. And then I could finally find out how it feels to be praised for my accomplishment.”

“Sorry to be blunt,” Isaiah interrupted him, “but where exactly does accomplishment come in if you’re just shadowing me? Were you planning on absorbing the information I gathered by osmosis?”

Milton just shrugged.

“I hadn’t thought that part through that well, I guess,” he replied, looking down in shame.

In spite of being stalked by Milton, Isaiah couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Here was someone who felt so miserable and trapped in his everyday life that he tried to cling, however clumsily, to even the slightest opportunity to feel like he was making a difference. To top it off, he had a personal connection to the case. Isaiah had to empathize. It was always his knee-jerk reaction, for better or worse.

“Milton. You’re going about this the wrong way,” Isaiah said gently. “The only way you can ever feel like you’ve truly achieved something is when you actually put in time and effort to arrive to your goal. There’s no shortcut to it, I’m afraid.”

“I guess,” Milton muttered.

“And if you wanted to be a part of this investigation, all you had to do was ask. It’s not too late to do that now you know,” Isaiah said.

“What do you mean?” Milton sparked up.

“You can help me with this,” Isaiah replied. “We can work on the case together. Whatever we discover about your uncle, and whatever the end result is, we can share the credit. How does that sound?”

Milton stared vacantly at him for a few moments, as if he needed to process what was just said. Then his lips curved into a barely-there smile and he nodded his head.

And so it was that Isaiah’s stalker unexpectedly turned into his partner for the case.