The equation will hold.
It has to.
Because if it doesn’t, I’ll go to her.
And the second I do, Valeria will know exactly where to find the only thing in this world that still makes me feel human.
Dear Nazareth,
I couldn't sleep last night.
Lay there listening to Paris being Paris—someone's music, a fight two streets over, a siren that showed up and left before I could decide if it mattered—and I just.
Thought about you. Not even coherently. Just you, the way you think about something that's become part of the wallpaper of your brain, always there in the background, humming.
I thought about your hands. The way you watched me. The specific feeling of being seen by someone who had memorized me before I knew he existed, and how I should probably still be disturbed by that and instead it's the thing I miss most.
I wonder if you allow yourself to think about me. I wonder if you lock it down the way you lock everything else. I hope you don’t. I hope I'm the thing that gets through, regardless. I hope I'm inconvenient for you.
Is that terrible? That's terrible.
Thank God for Ian. Genuinely. The man is a menace, but he keeps me from disappearing into my own head entirely, and I don't think he even knows he's doing it. He just…does it. Every day.And somehow that's enough to keep my pieces roughly in the same place.
That reminds me, we need more cheese.
4
SOPHIA
Ian makes my coffee wrong on purpose.
I know he does it on purpose because he's made it correctly six days a week for three months, and every Wednesday he puts in two sugars instead of one. When I call him on it the first time, he says his hand slipped. The second time, he says the spoon was bigger than he thought. By the third Wednesday, he just slides the cup across the counter with that crooked grin and waits.
Now, I know what to expect. Still, when I take a sip, I wince. “It's Wednesday again.”
“Is it?”
“You're doing the sugar thing.”
“What sugar thing?”
“The thing where you sabotage my coffee because you think it's funny.”
He takes a slow sip of his own—black, no sugar, the coffee of a man who treats flavor as an unnecessary complication. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”
I drink it anyway. I always drink it anyway, and he knows I will. It's a small, stupid, weekly thing that shouldn't matter at all, and I'd miss it terribly if it stopped.
Three months in Paris.
I don't know when surviving became routine and routine became something resembling a life. It wasn't a single moment. It was slow. The cafe on the corner became a Tuesday and Thursday thing, then a daily thing. The walks along the Seine started as Ian's idea and became something I reach for on my own, the way you reach for a coat when the weather turns. At some point, I started buying groceries instead of eating whatever was already in the fridge, and at some point after that, Ian started coming with me, and at some point after that, we started arguing about what to cook, and the bickering became a language of its own.
We have a life here. Quietly, without either of us planning it, we built one.
“Grocery run,” Ian says, rinsing his mug. “We need actual food. You baked three loaves of bread yesterday.”
“Baking is therapeutic.”
“Baking is a distress signal when you're on loaf number three. Come on.”
