The pen felt familiar in my hand.
I hesitated.
Flowers crossed my mind. They were a simple solution—immediate, visible, impossible to misinterpret. They didn’t even need to go to the studio. I knew exactly where she lived. I ran past her building most mornings, timed my route so I could see the lights in her windows before she left for work.
I checked my watch.
Then looked back at the card.
I could do both.
Mallory,
I considered the next line carefully. We needed to communicate in layers. That was important. Meaning had to live between the words, not inside them. Sometimes it wasn’t about what you said—it was about proving you were listening.
There was a temptation toward long sentences. Toward explanation. Toward letting her see the full shape of my thoughts.
I resisted.
She preferred precision. Clarity. No wasted language.
So, I wrote something brief. Direct. Something she would understand.
I didn’t sign it.
The pen strokes were clean, confident. I’d trained my left hand for this—hours of repetition until the slant felt natural, until the letters stopped betraying the muscle memory of my right.
When I was finished, I sealed the envelope and wrote her address in careful block print. No return name. No flourish.
Just enough to arrive.
I checked the board once more. Ashford. Varela. Still too close to call, but Ashford was nearer.
If I left now, I could observe both and still have time to deliver the card before midnight.
I packed the kit and carried the backpack upstairs, locking the door behind me. The system armed with its usual soft chime—three failed attempts and it wiped itself. No one had gotten that close yet. They were still circling the wrong places.
Only Mallory had come near the truth.
And she’d kept it to herself.
Such restraint. Such discipline.
I should reward that.
In the car, I started the engine and entered the route. Ashford blinked onto the screen, a clean blue line guiding me forward.
Flowers could wait.
Tonight was for listening.
Chapter
Six
MALLORY
You don’t expect something horrifying to come gift-wrapped.
