He told himself it was curiosity. A need to understand. His mind, that machine of logic and analysis, was simply trying to process an anomaly, to gather more data, to fit this impossible woman into some comprehensible framework.

  But day after day, he found himself returning to that spot across from The Grind. He learned her patterns without meaning to. She came in the late afternoon, most days, always taking the same corner table by the window. She'd pull out books, a laptop, those dense academic texts that seemed to require an entire language of their own to decipher. She'd read for hours, sometimes glancing up to watch people pass, her expression distant, unreadable.

  Sometimes he arrived too early and had to wait. Sometimes he came too late and she was already there, settled into her corner like she'd always belonged. But always, around evening, she would be at that window. Reading. Writing. Existing in a way that made the world feel sharper, more real.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He watched her walk toward the university campus more than once, her bag slung over one shoulder, her dark hair catching the fading light. A student, then. Or maybe something else. She moved like someone who knew where she was going, but there was something in the way she looked at the world—a careful observation, a measuring of spaces and people—that didn't quite fit the undergraduate mould.

  After a week of this—a week of standing across streets like some kind of stalker, a week of telling himself he was gathering data, a week of dreaming about her every single night—he finally worked up the courage to do something about it.