ROSETTE’S POV
The café was exactly what he’d promised.
Small and warm, completely unremarkable, tucked between a bookshop and a dry cleaner on a street I’d walked past a thousand times without ever noticing.
The kind of place that had mismatched chairs and hand-lettered menu boards and coffee that came in ceramic mugs instead of paper cups.
No one looked twice at us when we walked in.
That alone felt like a miracle.
After days of staring, of whispers, of photos plastered across every gossip site in existence, the simple anonymity of being two people getting coffee was almost disorienting.
We ordered at the counter — black coffee for him, something embarrassingly sweet for me that he didn’t comment on except to raise one judgmental eyebrow — and found a table by the window where the
