Between the Lines

It began as something she could almost ignore. Almost.

The first note appeared after an early shift, when the valley was still yawning awake. The Roma sat still, quiet and cold from the night. It was beaded with dew, every window fogged over, and tucked beneath the wiper blade was a square of paper gone soft at the edges. She peeled it free, ink blurred but still legible: Next Thursday. Same spot.

There was no name, no number. Just those words.

She told herself it was foolish to smile, but she did anyway, tucking the paper into the glove box as if it were contraband.

The second sign came a week later. She had taken the long way home through Oakville, skirting vineyards lined in precise green rows, when she noticed the faintest ribbon of dust lifting from a turnout up ahead. The space was empty when she reached it, but the pattern was fresh, tire marks curving into gravel and back again. Wide, confident arcs; the kind a heavier AMG GT would leave when its driver knew exactly how far to lean into the turn. Not many cars came through here at dusk. She knew whose it had been.

Another time, it was simpler. She finished a late meeting, stepped into the cool night air, and found headlights waiting at the far end of the lot. The car didn’t approach. Didn’t flash its brights. Just idled, steady and patient, a silhouette in the glow of sodium lamps. By the time she reached her own, the black machine eased away into the dark, leaving only the faint tremor of exhaust in its wake.

The AMG's growl faded into the valley's hush, the echo threading through the Roma's quiet idle like a line waiting to be drawn again.

Each gesture was so small it could have been nothing. A mistake. A coincidence. But the pattern made denial difficult.

One night she opened the glove box looking for a pen and found herself brushing against that first folded napkin. She held it in her palm, thumb worrying the creases, and realized the absurdity of it: how something so fragile, so barely there, had begun to carry more weight than whole conversations in her ordinary life.

These weren’t declarations. He hadn’t cornered her with questions or pressed her with demands. What he was offering, if that’s what this was, was something quieter. Space, not pressure. Presence, not insistence.

It unsettled her in a way the loudest words never had.

The following Thursday, she drove back to the overlook. No plan, no promise, just the compulsion to see if possibility still lingered there.

And there he was.

Not leaning against the car this time. Not standing with the studied patience of someone performing restraint. Just sitting on the hood, one leg bent, head tipped back like he was measuring constellations against the curve of the earth.

She pulled in, tires crunching gravel, heart caught between disbelief and recognition.

He slid down from the hood as she cut the engine. Their eyes met through the quiet.

No hello. No “you came.” Only the sound of cooling engines and the faint stir of the wind.

Heat drifted from the hoods, a slow release that felt less mechanical than mutual. It was as if both cars exhaled what their drivers couldn’t.

Somewhere inside, she understood: the words were never the point.

It was what lived between them: the space charged not with absence, but with everything unsaid.

And she realized then that the in-between could feel fuller than anything she’d known.