It felt important to have a slice-of-life chapter here, both because the Detective/Flea relationship needed some focus, and because the previous chapter got pretty dark.
Flea's brand of helpless, petty jealousy was something that I had in mind for him from the very conception of his character, and it was so fun to finally write it. So many of the things he's experiencing are firsts for him now, including these feelings he'd never imagined himself capable of feeling. It's a lot!
That's so fun you realised your detective had changed AS you were playing! I love that. I try to inject moments for protagonist character arcs, if the reader so chooses, and there are some developments that NEED to happen to further the story, but... I really love it when they seem to happen so organically you don't even realise at first. That's not something I can precisely engineer, so it's so exciting to hear about those kinds of moments.