The first note was crude, scrawled on lined paper, but it shifted everything.
"Who are you?" Elara wrote, the pen trembling. She left it beneath the till, her hand reluctant to let go.
Hours later, when she lifted the drawer again, her breath caught. The paper had returned, new words etched in a hand she had never seen:
"Kieran. You?"
She pressed her knuckles to her lips, giddy and afraid all at once.
That night, Kieran paced his apartment before writing back: "Elara. How?"
The paper came back with only two words: "Don't know."
And so it began—clumsy, halting exchanges, passed through a seam in the world neither understood. The notes grew longer, filled with fragments of daily life: Elara describing the old woman who always asked after romances; Kieran sketching the constellations above his building. They learned one another's handwriting as though it were voice, intimate and unmistakable.
Through the trembling lines of ink, a rhythm emerged—fragile, undeniable, like the first hesitant bars of a melody.