Alia couldn't stop thinking about him.
The man in the mist.
The eyes that lingered.
The way he vanished like a ghost and left her trembling, not with fear—but with knowing.
She had been seen.
Not in the polite way people glanced across grocery aisles or nodded on sidewalks. No, he had looked at her the way you read the final sentence of a novel you never wanted to end—slow, reverent, like it meant something.
And his letters… they meant everything.
---
That Morning
She awoke to a rustling.
There, on the typewriter, sat another page—no envelope this time. Just the page, resting like it had been waiting to breathe.
> "You said you know how it feels to hide.
But what if I told you I'm not hiding from you—
I'm hiding because of you.
You stir up words I buried years ago."
— M.
She pressed her hand to her chest.
What did she stir in him? And why did it feel like something inside her—some aching softness—was finally being acknowledged?
---
That Afternoon
Alia returned to Whittaker's Rare Books, searching for answers. The shop had become a kind of compass, every creak and shelf pointing her closer to something she couldn't name. She wandered through the poetry section, fingertips trailing over spines, half-hoping a clue might leap out at her.
And then… she found it.
An old journal, wedged between a travelogue and a faded memoir. Inside: handwritten poems, yellowed photographs, and pressed wildflowers. On the inside cover, scribbled in delicate black ink:
> Property of Ezra Whittaker, 1943.
She turned the pages carefully. The handwriting was different from the typed letters, but something about the phrasing felt eerily familiar.
One page caught her eye:
> "I write when I cannot speak.
I speak when I cannot bear the silence.
But you—
You are the silence I never feared."
Her breath hitched. It wasn't signed, but tucked beneath the page was a folded slip of newer paper.
Not Ezra's.
Typed.
> "He used to write letters and never send them.
I send mine to you,
Because something about your quiet tells me
You'd understand the language of the unsent."
— M.
She read it again.
And again.
This one hadn't come through the typewriter upstairs. It had been left here. Hidden.
Planted.
On purpose.
Her fingers tightened around the note. A slow realization began to bloom in her chest—this wasn't just about letters. "M." was leading her somewhere. Through his words. Through the spaces he occupied in secret.
She turned to the shop's back room, where an old filing cabinet sat in the corner beneath a skylight. Something she hadn't noticed before: a torn photograph tucked in the corner of the frame.
She pulled it free.
It showed a boy—maybe sixteen—standing outside Whittaker's, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes...
They were storm-colored. Familiar.
Could it be him?
The photo had a handwritten note on the back:
> "M. Whittaker — 2010. Ezra's grandson."
Her fingers trembled.
So that was it. "M." wasn't just a stranger in the fog. He was connected to the bookshop, to the typewriter, to the very attic she now lived in.
And he had been watching her from the start.
Not as a stalker.
Not as a ghost.
But as someone who had been waiting to be heard.
---
That Night
She rolled a fresh page into the typewriter. Her hands no longer trembled—they burned.
> "I found your words today.
Not the typed ones.
The ones you left behind like breadcrumbs in a place we both now call home.
If you're afraid to show your face—don't be.
Because I'm not afraid to know you."
— A.
And for the first time, she didn't fall asleep wondering if "M." would write back.
She fell asleep wondering what he might say when he finally spoke aloud.
---