I found it an hour before we had to leave for the airport — the chair and table are empty of anything else except The Prince.
I stood there for a moment, looking at the chair. At the book with its dense annotated margins and the yellow sticky note still visible at the top of the page, she'd been on.
She was just here.
I picked up the book and walked out of the library without much thought. It's a library book. It doesn't belong to her.
It doesn't belong to me either.
I'm aware of it the entire drive to the airport. I don't travel with books. Extra weight I don’t need to carry.
I take it out when we're at the gate, before we board. I sit slightly apart from the rest of the team, the way I always do. Silas is across the row with his headphones already on. Beckett is standing near the window, looking at the tarmac with the expression of someone who has been thinking about the same thing for too long and hasn't resolved it.
I open the book.
Her last note is still there. The yellow square, the forward-leaning handwriting, the two lines that have been running in the back of my skull since I first found them.
What if it's just the symptom?
Beneath it, my response in the margin. And beneath that — nothing. She hasn't responded yet. Which means either she hasn't seen it or she has and she's sitting with it.
I turn pages without reading them.
She must’ve left the library in a hurry, or she got pulled away, or she simply decided to go and left the book behind without thinking much about it. Any of those explanations is possible. None of them tells me where she went or whether she's coming back.
I have no way to reach her.
No number. No direct form of contact. Nothing except the library and the chair and the book in my hands that smells faintly like whatever she wears — something warm, something that has no business being detectable on the pages of a three-hundred-year-old political treatise.
I close the book.
Silas leans across the aisle and looks at the cover. "Are you reading?"
"No."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Thinking."
He puts his headphones back on.
I put the book away properly, zip the carry-on, and slide it under the seat in front of me when we board.
I think about hockey instead.
It almost works.
Thirty thousand feet over Oregon, and I have the book out again.
I don't remember taking it out.
I'm looking at the margins — my annotations, denser in some sections than others, the places where I argued with the text, and the places where I agreed, and the handful of places where I wrote something I'd forgotten I thought until I read it back. It’s years of thinking laid out in a dead man's book.
She found all of it.
She read every note. I can tell because her responses aren't localized — she didn't find one annotation, engage with it, and stop. She moved through the whole book slowly, reading what I wrote, sitting with it, pushing back where she disagreed, and going quiet where she didn't. There's a passage near the middle — something about the nature of enemies, how the most dangerous ones present as allies — where she left no note at all. Just underlined it twice.
I look at that underline for a long time.
