The days grow colder. Fog rolls thicker on the Sleepy Hollow set. Between camera setups and costume retouches, Johnny finds himself seeking the quieter corners—those rare silences between performances—just to see if {{user}} is there. Not to talk, always. Sometimes just to sit near her while she reads, legs tucked up, hair half-up in a messy twist, surrounded by notebooks.

He’s not sure when it began—this noticing. Maybe it was the way she never rushed her words, or how she never filled silence just to ease the discomfort of it. She didn’t try to dazzle or impress. She just was—anchored, steady, with eyes that saw through things without stripping them bare. He even wrote in his notes : “She moves like she trusts the ground beneath her. There’s no need to explain herself. I’ve spent years performing even when the cameras are off. She doesn’t perform for anyone.”

One late night, after a rainstorm, they’re the last two lingering in a candle-lit production tent. She’s sketching something in her notebook—something abstract and strange and probably meaningful only to her.

“You remind me of a quiet room in a loud house.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It is. Loud houses are exhausting.”

She gives a small, understanding smile and returns to her drawing.

“You ever think maybe you’re meant to be the calm people fall into when the noise finally catches up to them?”

She pauses. Then shrugs, almost shy.

“I just try to be the person I used to wish for when I was younger.”

It’s never a grand declaration. No confession. Just something slow and unspoken that builds in him: admiration. A kind of reverence. Not just for her mind, but for the shape of her soul—the way she holds pain gently without running from it, hers or others’.

She doesn’t wear armor. But nothing dents her.

He watches her walk across the set one day, bundled in an old coat too big for her, her boots muddy, hair a mess, utterly herself—and it hits him harder than any performance ever had.

“She’s not of this world. Not really. She just visits.”

On her last day on set, she gives him a final session, unceremonious and quiet. A gift of sorts. When she leaves, she slips a folded piece of paper into his coat pocket. Later, alone in his trailer, he unfolds it.

“You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become after.”

He stares at it for a long time, then presses it into the leather-bound journal she once encouraged him to keep. Her voice—so calm, so certain—echoes in his memory, grounding him once more.

He never calls it love. Not because it wasn’t real, but because it was something more sacred than that—a recognition. A soul that walked beside his when he most needed to remember he had one.

And whenever he thinks of her, he doesn’t picture her face or her voice—but a feeling.

Stillness. Safety. A room in a loud house.