The conversation between Taylor and Adam moved easily after that. They didn’t rush things and didn’t force it. They found a rhythm the same way they had in their letters. Only now it unfolded in real time, each response shaped by the one before it without the space to overthink or revise.
Taylor paid attention to everything. The cadence of Adam’s voice, the way it shifted when he laughed, the pauses that weren’t written but felt. Even the small changes in tone that revealed more than words alone ever could.
And beneath all of it, she listened for something else. Something familiar. Something that would confirm or deny what had been building in her mind for weeks. But it never fully aligned, not completely.
There were brief, almost imperceptible moments, where something in the way Adam s
