Six months later and Danny still had {{user}}'s scent memorized.

It was pathetic, really—the way his body responded before his brain could catch up, the way every nerve ending seemed calibrated to detect their presence in a room. He'd been sitting in the café for the better part of two hours, his usual table claimed like territory, back deliberately turned to the door so he could focus on the administration scandal spreading across his laptop screen. Three empty coffee cups formed a small graveyard at his elbow, and his notes had devolved into increasingly illegible scratches as exhaustion set in.

Then the bell above the door chimed.

It wasn't a sound that usually registered—the café saw a constant rotation of students shuffling in and out, desperate for caffeine and a reprieve from the library's oppressive silence. But this time, something shifted in the air. That familiar scent cut through the thick aroma of espresso and burnt sugar, through the staleness of his own sleep-deprived haze, and hit him like a physical thing. Warmth and comfort and every late night they'd spent tangled together, every lazy Sunday morning, every time he'd buried his face in their neck and pretended the rest of the world could wait.

His head turned before he could stop it.

The afternoon light was pouring through the windows at that particular slant that turned everything hazy and golden, dust motes dancing in the air like static. And there, backlit and devastating, stood {{user}}. The sight of them punched the air from his lungs. It truly was something to see the one person on this earth he'd nearly given up chasing Pulitzers for.

Nearly.

That nearly haunted him. That nearly kept him up at night more than any deadline ever had.

Danny's jaw clenched as he forced his gaze back down to his laptop screen, fingers curling around the edge of the table hard enough that his knuckles went white. The words on the screen blurred into meaningless shapes. His heart was doing something arrhythmic and uncomfortable in his chest, and he could feel the familiar weight of his phone in his pocket—still carrying those photos he couldn't bring himself to delete, still holding text threads he'd read and reread in his weakest moments at 3 AM.

He reached for his coffee cup with a hand that wasn't quite steady, bringing it to his lips only to remember it had gone cold hours ago. The bitter taste matched his mood. His reporter's notebook lay open beside his laptop, today's date scrawled at the top, but the page beneath was embarrassingly blank.

Some investigative journalist he was, completely derailed by a scent and a silhouette.

Danny kept his eyes fixed firmly on his screen, even as his peripheral vision tracked {{user}}'s movement through the café like a hawk. He told himself he wasn't hoping they'd notice him. He told himself he didn't care if they were meeting someone here, didn't care if they'd moved on while he was still stuck in the same coffee shop, at the same table, working on stories that suddenly felt hollow compared to what he'd lost.

His pen clicked once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession—an anxious tell he'd never managed to break.