You first see him in the rue des Rosiers, bent over a display of second-hand poetry, fingers trailing along the worn spines like someone tracing a memory. He has that same patient, polite face that always reads like an open book until you notice the underlines — the angles that sharpen whenever you catch him watching.

Paris in late autumn smells of wet stone and cigarette smoke. You’re on your way to a small, out-of-the-way gallery when he steps between you and a rack of postcards as if fate were practicing small permissions.

“Excuse me,” he says, voice warm, unremarkable. “Do you know if the gallery at the corner is open today?”

It’s a casual question. You answer, and that is how he begins: with a small courtesy, the kind of thread that will later become a net.

Over the next week he appears in odd, precise places — the bookshop with the exact single copy of a battered Chaucer you needed, the café where you sketch, the metro car you choose when rain makes the city thin and slick. He calls himself Joe. He talks about books, about exile, about wanting to start again. You tell half-truths and watch him stitch them into narratives.

You aren’t ordinary. You’ve learned that most people’s eyes go soft when you laugh; most people try to stay present when you’re near. Powers are quiet things — a held breath, a whispered suggestion of consequence. You keep them like winter coats: convenient, necessary, hidden from places where they might catch on a nail.

But Joe is different. His attention is a pressure. It makes the hairs on your arms rise. One night, at the Pont Neuf, you say something you don’t mean to: a joke about magic, a careless line about how you could make people forget.

He smiles like he understands a private joke. Later, at the flat he “borrows” for an hour — because he’s a stranger who will grow clever — he stores your address in the small, thoughtful places strangers store private currency.

You find out the truth because of fear. Fear is raw and fast and greedy. It can make you reckless in the name of self-preservation.

You don’t want him near your life, not when the edge of your control is thin. So you plan a small experiment: show him something that will keep him away. Nothing permanent, nothing that will hurt—just enough to scare him back into being only a polite stranger. A demonstration.

You invite him to the garden of the Musée Rodin under the pretense of discussing a book. He arrives with a bouquet of borrowed confidence, soft eyes, the kind of smile that says he’s already imagined you two in a thousand better drafts.

“Merci for coming,” you say, and then you let your hands go cold.

The air thickens like breath held too long. The copper leaves at your feet stop falling. A pigeon swivels in midair and forgets to land. You do not speak a word; you do not need to. You let the smallest, truest part of your will tilt, and the world obliges.

Joe’s expression shifts. First curiosity, then a pale, private alarm. He reaches for the bouquet in a reflex of politeness, and the roses drop, unfurling petals that slow and hang — drifting like moments caught in resin.

“Don’t,” you say quietly. “Look at me, Joe.”

He does. For a wild tiny second you think he might laugh it off. Instead, his jaw sets. The careful veneer cracks. You expect him to leave, to fold this image into a more rational memory and go home.

He doesn’t.

He asks questions you never intended to answer. “How?” he whispers. “Is it—dangerous? Are you alone?”

Every question is a foothold. Every foothold is a place where he can plant himself.

You tell a half-truth. “It’s not for others,” you say. “I don’t show people things.”

He nods like a man learning a new book again and again until the lines become a map. There is a flash in his eyes you’ve seen in lovers and in liars: the discovery that the world contains a secret somebody else did not deserve.