Alia left the letter open on her pillow.
She read it at least seven times before dawn, each word pressing into her skin like soft fingerprints. "Writing to you feels like breathing after a long time underwater." That sentence alone had wrecked her. No one had ever said anything like that to her. No one had seen her like that.
And now someone had.
She didn't know how he knew her name. But it wasn't fear she felt—it was… a pull. A delicate tether between her and someone she hadn't touched, hadn't spoken to, hadn't even properly seen.
Not yet.
---
Later That Day
Fog had rolled into Eastcliff like a secret. The streets shimmered in a grey veil, muffling the clang of boats in the harbor and the bells of bicycles zipping down the cobblestone lanes.
Alia wrapped her scarf tightly and made her way down to the cliffs, following the narrow path behind Whittaker's that wound through pine and sea-grass. She didn't know what she expected—another letter on the desk? A message carved into driftwood?
She found neither.
Instead, standing near the edge of the rocky shoreline, she saw him.
A man.
His coat was long and dark, his posture still and unreadable. He stood with his back to her, head tilted slightly to the side as if listening to the waves. Fog curled around him, blurring the sharpness of his frame.
Alia froze.
Something in her chest—some unexplainable recognition—ignited. Her breath caught.
She took a step forward. "Hello?"
The man turned—slowly.
For one flickering second, their eyes met through the haze. He was tall, with a shadow of stubble on his jaw, and eyes the color of an overcast sky—pale, searching, familiar. Too familiar.
Her voice wavered. "Are you—?"
But before she could finish, he stepped backward, vanishing into the wall of mist like a breath held too long.
She ran after him, boots crunching on gravel, lungs tight with adrenaline—but when she reached the spot where he had stood, the space was empty.
Gone.
Like he had never been there.
But something remained.
Half-buried beneath a smooth stone, nestled in the moss, was another envelope.
She picked it up with shaking fingers.
> "I didn't mean for you to see me. Not yet.
But I saw you the first night you arrived.
Barefoot at the window. Wrapped in words you hadn't written yet.
You looked like a poem trying to forget its last line."
— M.
Alia's throat tightened.
Because the night she arrived, she had stood at the window.
She had been barefoot.
And she had cried into the pages of her empty notebook.
He had seen her.
Not just then—but somehow, before. As if he'd been watching her heart longer than she had.
---
That night, she placed her reply in the typewriter:
> "If you're afraid I won't understand you...
You're wrong.
I don't know who you are,
But I know how it feels to hide."
— A.
And for the first time in years, she didn't feel alone in the quiet.
She felt… watched. Known. Wanted.
Even if only through midnight letters.
---