The street outside is cool and bright, the kind of Paris morning that looks exactly like a postcard and smells like diesel and bread and the faint sweetness of something blooming in a window box two floors up. I pull my coat tighter and walk the four blocks with my hands in my pockets, telling myself I’m getting pastries because I’m hungry and not because I cannot sit alone in that apartment with my own thoughts for one more minute.
The bakery is warm and loud in the way small French bakeries are loud—the sound of trays and voices and the hiss of something hitting a hot surface. I order in my increasingly functional French, receive two croissants and apain au chocolatand the bakery owner’s polite correction of exactly one vowel, and turn back toward the street.
That’s when I feel it.
A quality in the air behind me, pressing against my spine like a palm that isn’t there. A weight that doesn’t belong to the foot traffic and the morning noise. Familiar in a way I can’t place, like a word in a language I learned young and haven’t spoken in months.
I slow without meaning to. Turn, casually, the way you turn when you’re checking for a gap in the traffic.
The street is ordinary. A woman with a stroller. An old man with a baguette under his arm. Two tourists consulting a map with matching expressions of optimistic confusion.
Nothing.
My pulse stutters, then surges as I stand there for one more second, pastry bag warm in my hands, pulse doing something unnecessary. I can’t deny the fact that I wish it was him. And for a moment I imagine itishim. That he’s watching me from a distance. Or maybe he’s right behind me, and my skin prickles like he’s standing inches away breathing steadily against the back of my neck.
I don’t want to turn. Because if I do—if I look and there’s nothing there—it’ll crush me more than the absence of his flowers. And if there is something…
God, I can’t think of that.
Without turning, I walk back to the apartment, that familiar feeling never leaving me. But I refuse to look around. I refuse to search for a ghost I’m not even sure is there.
The elevator chimes as steel doors open, and my heart sinks to the soles of my feet when I see an empty hallway in front of the apartment door. The flowers have never arrived this late.
Ian is sitting at the counter when I walk in, note in hand, and the expression on his face stops me in the doorway. No smirk, no eyebrow cocked in judgment, no dry commentary. This is something else. Something stripped back and direct, theexpression he gets when he’s decided to stop being Ian for a minute and just be honest.
“You left without me.”
I place the bakery bag on the counter. “I went four blocks, Ian. In broad daylight. To a bakery I've been to a hundred times.”
“You left. Without me.” He sets the note down flat, deliberate, like he's setting down something heavier than paper. “Four blocks. A parking lot. The elevator. It doesn't matter. The distance is not the point.”
“I left you a note.”
“A note.” He repeats it the way you repeat something when you want the other person to hear how it sounds. “You left me a note.”
“I didn't want to wake you. You needed the sleep?—”
“Sophia.” Just my name. Flat and final, the way he almost never uses it. “If something had happened to you while I wasasleep—” He stops. Looks away for a second, jaw tight, and when he looks back, the armor is completely gone. Just him. Just the thing underneath all the jokes and the deflection and the easy grin. “I made Reth a promise. You understand what that means to me. What it would cost me if I—” He cuts himself off. Exhales. “You don't get to decide the risk is small enough that I don't need to know. That is not how this works. Not ever.”
I want to argue. I can feel the argument sitting there, reasonable and ready—it was fine, nothing happened, you can't wrap me in cotton wool forever.But something in his face stops me. The rawness of it. The fact that he's not performing concernright now, not managing me, not doing the Ian thing where everything is slightly ironic and nothing costs him anything.
This is costing him something.
“Okay,” I say. Quietly. “You're right.”
He holds my eyes, making sure it lands all the way down. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He keeps my gaze for another moment, then takes thepain au chocolatfrom the bag without asking and bites into it, and just like that, the armor is back, the easy grin sliding into place like it was never gone. But I saw underneath it. That’s the thing about Ian—you only get the real version in flashes, and only if you’re paying attention.
“The flowers didn’t come,” I say.
He looks at me. “It’s not even eleven.”
“They’re always here by eight.”
“Crazy.” He breaks off another piece of pastry. “It’s not even eleven.”
