Chapter Text
Mozzie had marked the anniversary the way he marked most things: privately, with good wine and better silence. It had been four years since the death of Neal Caffrey. He didn’t visit graves. He didn’t attend memorials. He absolutely did not believe in monuments to men who refused to be buried.
Instead, he lived in Neal’s apartment.
June had offered it the week after the funeral, gentle and resolute, as though she were entrusting him with a fragile heirloom. Mozzie had accepted under false protest and moved in under cover of night, transporting his life in banker’s boxes and unmarked garment bags. The safe houses dwindled after that. Storage lockers were surrendered. Burner phones went unused long enough to gather dust.
He told himself it was temporary.
Four years later, his teacups occupied Neal’s kitchen cabinet, his vinyl shared space with Neal’s records, and his socks were tucked into the bottom drawer of Neal’s dresser.
He had not touched the paints, but he had long since finished Neal’s stash of wine.
The easels remained precisely as Neal had left them; palettes dried out, canvases slightly askew, brushes haphazardly spilled on the floor underneath from a night Mozzie refused to remember in detail. He dusted around it weekly, never directly on it. Preservation without participation.
This afternoon, however, the apartment was overtaken by paper.
Cream stock, heavyweight, hand-pressed. Gold ink in an elegant script that Mozzie had practiced until it looked effortless. He sat at Neal’s old drafting table, now reclaimed as a command center, addressing envelopes with meticulous concentration.
Elizabeth Burke’s Baby Shower
Penthouse Terrace
Saturday, Two O’Clock Sharp
Mozzie sanded the final flourish and held the envelope at arm’s length, assessing.
“Presentation,” he muttered, “is ninety percent of persuasion.”
He had spent weeks assembling this guest list. There were spreadsheets. There were color palettes. There had been, briefly, a mood board before he’d burned it on principle.
Elizabeth Burke hadn’t had a baby shower for her firstborn; it had been a casualty of grief.
No one had said it that way, of course. They had said there wasn’t time. They had said the funeral arrangements were complicated. They had said Peter Burke was taking leave. They had said Neal would have wanted—
Mozzie stopped listening.
There were two things Mozzie wasn’t sure he could ever forgive Neal for. The first was the way his death robbed the Burkes of being able to fully experience the joy of pregnancy. It was his most valuable and least forgivable heist.
Neal Burke entered the world quietly, into a house still echoing with the footsteps of the Neal who preceded him. There had been casseroles instead of confetti cannons. Blacks and grays and blues where pastels should have been. Joy still felt like contraband.
Mozzie remembered standing in the Burke kitchen, holding a wrapped gift he had selected with suspicious tenderness; a silver rattle engraved with a constellation visible the night the child was born. He was done being afraid to make noise.
Joy, he had decided sometime during mourning, was not something that arrived naturally. It had to be engineered. Curated. Conjured with precision. If the universe refused to balance its books, he would do it himself.
So when Elizabeth announced her second pregnancy, Mozzie capitalized. He embraced the joy of it wholeheartedly. Aggressively, even.
This time, there would be flowers imported at unreasonable expense. There would be tiered desserts assembled with architectural integrity. There would be a string quartet, lightly vetted for federal affiliations. There would be a game involving falsified baby photographs and a prize of rare tea smuggled through entirely respectable channels.
There would be laughter loud enough to rattle the windows of the penthouse and scandalize the neighbors.
He finished addressing the stack of envelopes and leaned back, rolling his shoulders. The room smelled faintly of ink and the bergamot oil he’d dabbed at his wrists that morning. Sunlight filtered through the tall windows, catching dust motes in a way that felt cinematic.
Neal would have appreciated the lighting. The thought came uninvited, as they often did.
The second thing he was unsure if he had forgiveness in his heart for, was that of course by now, Mozzie knew Neal was alive.
He had known in the way one knows a magic trick is a facade, even when the mechanics are precisely hidden. The math had never added up. Ballistics reports, timelines, the convenient chaos of it all. Neal had always been allergic to endings that neat.
Mozzie snorted softly at the memory. There had also been the Queen of Hearts. Neal had left more evidence too, but not for him. That had been the wound.
Neal had orchestrated his resurrection for Peter with a carefully placed breadcrumb trail. He had trusted Peter to follow the thread, to respect the theatrics of it.
Mozzie, apparently, had been expected to simply know. He did know, but knowing was not the same as being included. He refused to leave New York to chase him down on premise.
For four years, Mozzie had lived in the apartment of a dead man who was not dead. He had answered condolences with dignified nods. He had watched Peter discover the truth in stages, the storage unit, the wine bottle, the coordinates hidden in plain sight, and he had pretended not to notice the shift in Peter’s breathing when the realization dawned. He hadn’t been invited into that moment either.
Neal had always said they were partners. Partners, Mozzie believed, did not stage their own funerals solo.
Anger, Mozzie had learned, could calcify if left unattended. It could settle into the joints and make movement difficult. So he did what he always did with difficult emotions: he built something elaborate around them.
This time, it was a baby shower.
Because if Neal insisted on grand gestures and impossible theater, Mozzie could respond in kind.
He gathered the invitations into a leather folio and slipped on his coat. The hallway outside the apartment was quiet, June’s radio drifting faintly from downstairs, something brassy and optimistic.
On the stoop, he paused, glancing up and down the street with habitual caution. Old instincts did not vanish; they merely retired to advisory roles.
The one government system Mozzie trusted was the United States Postal Service.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” he recited under his breath, approaching the blue mailbox at the corner. “An oath with admirable attachment issues.”
He fed the envelopes through the slot one by one, listening to the soft thud as they landed. Paper into steel. Intention into motion.
There was one envelope left in his coat pocket. It was addressed in the same elegant script, though it bore no name.
To Whom It May Concern
No street address. No city. Just a small, discreet mark in the upper corner, a queen’s crown sketched so faintly it could be mistaken for a printer’s error.
Mozzie turned the envelope over in his hands.
They were not in contact. There had been no clandestine calls, no encrypted emails, no whispered updates smuggled through intermediaries. Four years of silence was either a punishment or a test. Mozzie had not yet decided which.
Back at the apartment, Estelle waited in her brass cage by the window, preening with self-importance.
“Against my better judgment,” Mozzie informed her, opening the cage, “we are conducting a seance of sorts.”
Estelle cocked her head.
He secured the envelope into the small leather harness designed for precisely this kind of indiscretion. His fingers lingered for half a second longer than necessary.
“This is not an olive branch nor are you a dove,” he spoke decidedly. Whether he was convincing himself or Estelle was up for debate.
He lifted her to the open window. The city hummed below. Taxis, voices, a distant siren that could have meant anything.
Estelle took to the air in a sharp burst of white and gray, circling once before angling decisively south, not toward any obvious landmark, but toward a vector only Mozzie and one other man would recognize.
Mozzie tracked her until she was no more than a suggestion against the skyline.
The apartment felt different in her absence. Quieter. Expectant.
He crossed to the easel without fully meaning to.
After a long moment, he set up a blank canvas.
The first brush stroke was tentative, almost accusatory. The second steadier. The colors and patterns that followed were not polished, but they felt familiar, like something Neal had once painted lazily on a summer evening when the windows were open and the future had not yet required such elaborate contingencies.
Mozzie stopped shy of the artwork feeling finished.
“You are not the sole proprietor of spectacle,” he said softly to the empty room.
He set the palette down gently. Joy, he reminded himself, was an act of defiance.
He straightened his jacket, surveyed the neat stacks of planning notes on the table: caterer confirmations, floral diagrams, contingency plans labeled in Roman numerals. Taking in the apartment as he often did, Mozzie allowed himself the smallest, most dangerous thing of all:
Hope.
If everything went according to plan, Elizabeth would glow, Peter would relax for a single unguarded hour, and laughter would spill over the terrace like champagne. Unannounced but impeccably dressed, a ghost would prove he was flesh and blood.
If everything went according to plan, no one would ever be able to say exactly how it happened.
But Mozzie would know.