I am a fool for you, and the things that you do
Emma's Pov
It has been two weeks since I last saw Aubrey.
Fourteen long days.
Fourteen nights where the city folded into its quiet shadows and I found myself listening — without meaning to, without deciding to — for footsteps that never came. Fourteen mornings, the first thing I reached for, in that unguarded space between sleep and waking when the mind hasn't yet remembered to protect itself, was the thought of him. And the first thing I didn't find was him.
And in those fourteen days, something strange kept arriving in his place.
At first, it was just flowers — white tulips tied with silk ribbon, their petals trembling as though they were breathing, as though they had been handed over still alive and hadn't yet understood they'd been separated from their roots. Then came the Hershey's Kisses, a small handful of them nestled inside a tiny linen pouch tied at the neck with a neat bow. A letter on textured cream paper, the ink slanted and elegant — the handwriting of someone who learned to write the way they learned everything else: with more care than was strictly necessary.
Then more.
A small glass vial of lavender buds, the scent reaching me before I'd finished unwrapping it.
A pressed forget-me-not sealed between two pieces of wax paper with the delicacy of something someone had been afraid to crush.
A bookmark cut from watercolour paper, brushed with soft, deliberate strokes of blue — not decorative, exactly. More like a small painting that had accepted a practical purpose.
A packet of rose tea.
A single page torn carefully from a poetry book — Rilke, Love consists in this — the edges worn soft, a single line underlined so gently that the pen must have hesitated. As though the underlying was an admission, and the pressure had to be managed accordingly.
Each one left quietly.
Each one was placed somewhere I would find it — but always when I wasn't looking, always without the hand that placed it making itself known. As though the point were the gift and not the giver. As though being known required no credit.
June became obsessed. She had appointed herself the investigation's lead analyst, approaching each new arrival with the focused energy of someone who has decided this is the most important puzzle currently available to her. She decoded ribbon styles. She held cards up to windows and examined ink for indentation patterns.
Emmett inspected every delivery like a man who suspects the evidence has been tampered with — squinting at the handwriting, testing the weight of envelopes, studying the knots in ribbon as though they might contain a confession.
They both think they know who is sending them.
They're both probably right.
Aubrey Ardel doesn't leave enough traces of himself.
He arrives the way winter arrives — silent, breathtaking, impossible to catch in the act of becoming. And he disappears the same way: completely, without announcement, leaving you to wonder whether the cold was always there or whether something specific departed.
He is the kind of man who carries entire symphonies behind his eyes and never lets anyone hear the full melody. Who stands close enough that the distance feels deliberate — chosen, maintained, a boundary he enforces without naming it. Who looks at you the way you look at something you are trying to memorize before it goes, and then disappears before you can ask him what he was committing to memory and why?
Someone like that — precisely someone like that — shouldn't leave rosemary sprigs wrapped carefully in twine.
Shouldn't tear pages from poetry books for a girl whose hands always carry the faint smell of coffee grounds and ink.
Shouldn't scatter small, considered pieces of himself across someone's days like breadcrumbs left by someone who hopes they'll be followed home.
No.
Someone like him shouldn't do these things.
But he does.
I try my best to hide the truth — the one I keep buried beneath sarcasm and small smiles and the performance of someone who has her feelings firmly organized and accounted for.
That I have already fallen for him.
Deeply. Irrevocably. In the way of something that happened before I noticed it was happening — like my heart tripped over something in the dark and never quite found its balance again, and has been listing slightly ever since, and has stopped expecting to straighten out.
He doesn't know.
He can't know.
I barely let myself know — I approach the knowledge the way you approach something fragile, circling it carefully, never putting my full weight on it, checking the ground before each step.
And every time a new gift appears — a caramel candy with a tiny heart doodled in pen on the wrapper, a sprig of baby's breath tucked into my apron pocket with the precise placement of something intentional — something flutters wildly inside me. Something foolish. Something that understands perfectly well that it's dangerous and has decided to be dangerous anyway.
Not because I know with certainty that they're from Aubrey.
But because part of me — the part that doesn't consult reason before arriving at its conclusions — wants to believe he cares enough to leave pieces of himself scattered in my world. That he does it because he loves me too, and this is what that looks like from the inside of someone who doesn't yet know how to say it directly.
Late at night, when the apartment is quiet, and the city has dimmed to something manageable outside the window, I let myself imagine it — for the length of exactly one breath, the way you allow yourself one match in the dark:
Aubrey choosing these things with hesitant fingers, deliberating over small objects in quiet shops, picking up and putting down and picking up again.
Aubrey writing the notes and rewriting them, crumpling the failed attempts into his coat pocket, starting again on fresh paper with slightly different words and the same uncertain intention.
Aubrey standing outside the café on a morning I don't know about, working up the courage to knock or leave or do something with what he's feeling that isn't simply feeling it in private.
But dawn comes. And reality returns — cold and sensible, the way it always is, the way it has to be.
He hasn't come back.
He hasn't called. Hasn't walked past the window with that particular unhurried quality of someone who is pretending not to have a destination. Hasn't sat at the counter with his coffee going cold while he looked at the wall and was somewhere else entirely.
He's gone.
So why does my heart still rise — treacherous, embarrassingly hopeful — every time the café doorbell rings and I hear it before I've decided not to care?
Why does every bouquet make me ache for the one who might have sent it?
Why do I still wait for him, quietly, without having decided to?
Maybe because loving him feels like waiting for something that was never promised and still feels inevitable. The specific contradiction of something you didn't ask for and cannot seem to put down.
Maybe because the smallest, most stubborn part of me still believes he'll walk through that door again — and that his eyes will find me the way they always did, softening slightly, as though finding me were a relief rather than simply a fact.
And until then, I tuck each gift away with the same care I use to tuck away the truth:
I've fallen for Aubrey Ardel.
And he has absolutely no idea.
This morning, I was smiling to myself.
A small, helpless kind of smile — the variety that arrives before you've decided to wear it, that settles onto your lips while you're doing something else entirely and stays there, unasked for, slightly embarrassing in its transparency.
I knew that today, as always, something would arrive. Another quiet piece of him left at the edges of my world — another small mystery wrapped in silk or pressed between pages or folded into an envelope with the careful economy of someone who says a great deal by choosing what to include and what to leave out.
I moved through my apartment in the soft winter light spilling unevenly across the floorboards, half smiling, half wondering: What would it be today? A flower? A folded note with that slanted, deliberate handwriting? A pressed petal from something he'd decided I needed to have? A line of poetry that would sit on the back of my tongue all afternoon, resurfacing at inconvenient moments?
But beneath all that —
beneath the guessing and the anticipation and the particular flutter of excitement that had, over two weeks, become as routine as the morning itself —
There was a real desire.
The one I try not to name directly, the way you try not to name things that gain power from being named.
The urge — desperate, persistent, aching in the specific way of something that doesn't diminish with time — to hope that today, instead of another gift, he would appear.
That today he would finally be the one waiting for me.
That there would be a knock — not a delivery, not a neighbour, not anyone with a practical purpose — and I would open the door and find him. Those impossible green eyes, the ones that look through people rather than at them, like they're reading something written in smaller print on the other side. Standing taller than I always seem to remember, shoulders carrying the particular tension of a man who isn't entirely sure he should be there. Hair falling messily across his forehead in the way that does something involuntary to something in me every single time.
I want — God, I want — to catch even one breath of the scent that clings to him. That cold, clean smell of winter wind layered over something darker, deeper, something that belongs specifically to him and nowhere else.
I want to see the way his lashes lower when he's thinking through something difficult.
I want to watch his mouth move between a frown and something softer — that specific, unguarded transition that happens when he forgets to maintain the distance he usually keeps between himself and the room.
And I want to touch him.
Not fully. Not boldly. Just a small contact — a brush of fingers against his sleeve, barely anything, a momentary confirmation that he's real. I didn't imagine the things I saw in his eyes that night. That the warmth I felt was actually there and not something I constructed in the hopeful dark of my own wanting.
It feels foolish — objectively, transparently foolish — to want someone this much without knowing whether the wanting moves in both directions. To long for someone who ghosts through rooms like smoke, who disappears behind silence, who leaves pieces of himself scattered through my days but never appears himself.
But waiting for him has become part of my mornings.
Part of the rhythm of my breathing.
Part of the strange, persistent hope that carries me from one end of the day to the other without my having asked it to.
And today, standing in my apartment smiling at nothing and everything — at the winter light, at the accumulated weight of two weeks of small gifts, at the foolish invincible feeling of being in love with someone you can't have and can't stop wanting —
I let myself hope, just for this one morning, that the greatest gift he could leave me —
was simply himself.
There was a knock on my apartment door.
Short. Firm. Entirely unfamiliar.
Not June's playful, impatient tapping — the knock that dances across wood in that particular rhythm of hers, always slightly syncopated, always sounding like it's enjoying itself. Not Emmett's heavy, chaotic pounding that announces itself three seconds before it arrives and rattles the doorframe as though he's concerned it might not hold.
This one was precise. Neutral. Too deliberate to be casual — the knock of someone who had calculated exactly how much force the situation required and applied it without excess.
It slid into my spine, unwinding a thin, cold ribbon of alertness. Not panic. Not fear. The specific, practiced attention of someone whose instincts have been trained past the point of choice. My hands stilled mid-motion. The coffee pot steamed behind me. The ordinary morning around me — which had been ordinary in the way all mornings are when you are smiling to yourself and not paying close attention — felt suddenly, quietly punctured.
"Delivery for Miss Emma!"
My breath caught. Small and sharp, the way breath catches when the body registers something before the mind has caught up.
I approached the door carefully, each step soft against the tiled floor. My fingers found the hidden gun beneath the counter before I had consciously decided to reach for it — a reflex so practised it had stopped feeling like a decision years ago. A touch of metal. A promise of safety. A reminder, if one were needed, of the world I actually inhabited beneath the one I presented.
My hand stayed anchored there as I cracked the door open.
A blade of cool morning air cut through the narrow opening, catching the loose strands of my hair and lifting them briefly.
Outside stood a man in a sky-blue uniform.
Brown eyes. Calm, professional calm — the careful blankness of someone who has delivered things to many doors and understood that his job is to be invisible. Skin lightly flushed from the winter wind. A neatly pressed shirt tucked into matching trousers. A cap with the delivery company's logo embroidered in silver thread at the front.
He looked so completely, painfully normal that it made me more suspicious rather than less. He was precisely the kind of man people forget after a single glance — which was either a coincidence or design, and in my experience, those two things were rarely the same.
There was something in his hand.
An envelope.
Thick, luxurious parchment — the kind that has weight to it, that announces its own quality before you've done anything except touch it. The edges gilded softly, catching the winter light with the quiet confidence of something that knows its own worth. And written across the front, in elegant looping black ink that arrived in my chest before my eyes had finished reading it:
Emma.
That handwriting.
I knew that handwriting.
"Ma'am, I just need your signature," he said. Polite. Warm. Waiting.
I forced a small smile, though my pulse had found its way to my throat and was conducting its own separate business there.
I took the clipboard.
For the slightest moment — less than a breath, barely even that — my pen hovered. Then, with the controlled precision of someone who has made a decision and is committing to it, I wrote the name I was never supposed to give freely:
Ayah Ferdous.
He received the clipboard back with a small nod. "Have a good day, ma'am."
"You too," I murmured.
The door closed. The latch clicked into place with a small, ordinary sound that had no business feeling as significant as it did.
The apartment settled into silence around me.
All I could hear was my own pulse, conducting itself at a slightly elevated tempo.
I set the gun on the table where the morning sun had spilled across the surface, turning dust motes into floating gold. My fingers — not entirely steady — lifted the envelope. Its texture was soft yet substantial. The kind of weight that suggests intention rather than convenience, care rather than efficiency.
I inhaled once.
And opened it.
Two things slipped free with a faint, whispering shift of parchment:
A concert ticket.
And a letter.
The ticket rested on my palm — black matte with gold accents, the kind of object that has been designed to look like an occasion rather than simply an entry pass. Front row. Not an accident. Not a lucky allocation. A choice, made deliberately, by someone who wanted me close.
But it was the letter that made my breath stutter and stall.
I recognized the handwriting before I had registered that I recognized it — my body knowing before my mind had assembled the evidence.
Aubrey.
His script was precise. Deliberate. Almost sculpted — each letter formed with a restrained care that told more truth than most people manage with their actual words. The handwriting of someone who has strong feelings and a strong preference for not spilling them carelessly.
My stomach tightened, warmth and fear arriving simultaneously and occupying the same space inside my chest as I unfolded the paper.
Dear Emma,
How are you?
I know it's very rude of me not to show up or visit, but trust me — I was extremely busy.But now that I have a chance to meet you, I don't want to miss it.
On the 24th of December, at 9 P.M., I will be having a violin show — more like a contest — and I want you to come.
I want you to watch me. And I also have something important to tell you.
I hope you will come.
Yours,A.AAubrey Ardel
Time didn't stop.
But my world did — briefly, completely, with the specific quality of stillness that happens when something arrives that you have been waiting for without admitting you were waiting.
The breath I'd been keeping trapped inside me released itself in one long, slow, trembling exhale.
This wasn't a polite invitation. It wasn't casual correspondence, the kind of thing sent to maintain a connection without risking anything. It wasn't something he would send to any girl in any city who happened to have crossed his path.
This was intentional.
He wanted me there.
Not as a stranger in the audience. Not as a customer from the café who might recognize his name on a poster. Not as someone who existed in his periphery, vaguely, without particular weight.
He wanted me —
with all my lies living quietly underneath the surface of me, with my hidden name and my hidden life and my hidden purpose that he had no knowledge of, walking straight into —
he wanted my eyes on him. Watching him play. Watching him breathe. Watching him step into the specific vulnerability of a spotlight, where there is nowhere to look except inward and nowhere to hide the feelings that music pulls to the surface, whether you've agreed to share them or not.
He wanted me close enough to see the tension in his fingers. The precision of his bow arm. The particular expression that moves across his face when he is playing honestly — the one I had only glimpsed once, briefly, and had been turning over in my memory ever since.
And something important.
Those two words settled into me like a second heartbeat — taking up residence alongside my own, insistent, impossible to ignore.
A confession?
A truth he'd been carrying for two weeks of silence and white tulips and torn-out poem pages?
A warning?
I didn't know. I couldn't know yet. But I felt its weight with absolute clarity. Its urgency. The particular hope that lives in those words when they come from someone who has been choosing silence for weeks and has finally decided that silence is no longer sufficient.
For two weeks, I had been receiving fragments of him — whispers of presence in the form of flowers and chocolates and pressed petals and careful handwriting. Small pieces, left at the edges of my days. An accumulation of small, deliberate things that said I am thinking of you without saying it directly.
But this —
This was not a fragment.
For the first time, he wasn't sending something small or symbolic. He wasn't leaving a piece of himself for me to find and interpret and tuck away.
He was offering something real.
He was offering himself — his music, his moment, his something important — and asking me to show up and receive it.
And that alone was enough to terrify me.
And more than enough to undo me.
Outside, snowflakes clung to the deliveryman's jacket as he stepped onto the sidewalk, brushing them from his shoulders with the easy, automatic gesture of someone accustomed to the cold. He pulled out his phone and dialled.
"Mr. Ardel?" His voice was professional, efficient. "Yes, it's me. I just dropped off the parcel."
He shifted his weight on the pavement, tucking the signed receipt safely under his arm against the wind.
"Yes, she accepted it." A brief pause. "And she signed the proof herself."
Another pause, listening.
"Everything's in order. I'll deliver the receipt to your office within the hour."
A short exchange followed — clear, transactional, quickly concluded.
"Alright, sir. Yes. Understood." He nodded once, more to himself than to the phone. "I'll see to it."
"Have a good day, Mr. Ardel."
He ended the call. Slipped the phone back into his coat pocket. Turned his collar up against the wind and continued walking through the snow — steady, unhurried, entirely unaware of the storm that the signature tucked under his arm was about to set in motion.
Ayah Ferdous.
Written in a hand that had been trying, for weeks, to belong to someone else.
Delivered now, quietly, into the hands of the one man who had been looking for exactly that name.