Chapter 27: A Writer's Devotion
The rooftop lights had burned like captured stars in her mind all night. She couldn’t sleep. The weight of his gift—the annotated Austen, the sheer, terrifying vulnerability of his handwritten notes—lay on her chest like a precious, living thing. It demanded a response. Not a thank you note. Not flowers. Something of equal weight. Something that proved she saw him, too.
He’d mentioned it once, months ago, when they’d argued about children’s literature over her fence. He’d been sweaty and frustrated from a drill, kicking a ball relentlessly against the rebound net. “The Little Prince,” he’d said, not looking at her. “My mum read it to me. In French. She was from Lyon.” He’d stopped the ball with his foot, his voice gone quiet. “It’s the only thing I remember perfectly about her. The sound of those words. I don’t even have the book anymore.”
The memory flashed before her as she sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor at 3 a.m., surrounded by a chaos of art supplies. She’d bought a blank, leather-bound journal months ago for a project never started. Its pages were thick and creamy, suitable for ink.
Her French was good, but not perfect. She’d studied it at university, fallen in love with the rhythm of it. She found the original text online, Le Petit Prince. She would copy it out. By hand. Every word.
But that was just the skeleton. The flesh would be her own.
She lit the lavender-scented candle on her desk, its golden light pooling over the empty page. The distant, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Callum practicing in his yard—even now, in the deep night—was her metronome. She dipped her pen.
Lorsque j’avais six ans… When I was six years old…
Her hand began to move. The French script flowed, careful and looping. She was not just copying; she was inhabiting. And in the wide margins, she began to write her own commentary.
Next to the pilot’s first meeting with the little prince, she wrote in English: He appears in the desert, where you are most lost. (See: a surly footballer moving in next door to a blocked writer.)
Her fingers ached. The ink stained her knuckles, a blue-black badge of labor. She worked through the night, the candle guttering low and then burning bright again as she lit a new one. The scent of warm wax and dried lavender blurred with the exhaustion in her eyes.
She drew parallels only she could see. The prince’s rose, vain and difficult, protected under a glass dome: We protect what we love, even when it prickles. (Your career, your privacy. The glass dome you live in.)
The fox, begging to be tamed: “One must endure the wind and the rain to earn the wheat-gold hair.” You have to show up. Consistently. It’s the only way to make a connection. (You showed up. On my doorstep. On the roof.)
Her commentary shifted, became more personal. On the page where the prince laments leaving his rose, she wrote: The fear of causing pain by leaving. Of being forgotten. (You carry this. I see it in your eyes after every away game.)
Dawn was a pale suggestion at the window when she reached the end. The prince’s body, too heavy to take with him. The snake. The letting go. Her pen hovered.
She wrote, her letters trembling with fatigue: He returns to his asteroid, to his rose, because duty and love are the same thing. It is not an end, but a circling back. A commitment to the thing you chose to care for. (You will always have to leave. And I will always be here, learning the routines of your absence.)
She closed the book. Her hands were a map of blue stains. Her eyes burned. Outside, the thud-thud-thud had finally ceased. The world was silent, holding its breath.
She didn’t change out of her paint-stained sweats. She didn’t fix her hair, a wild nest of platinum curls. She simply picked up the journal, still warm from her hands, and walked next door.
The sky was bleeding peach and violet over the rooflines. She knocked softly on his front door.
He opened it almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting. He was in training gear again, a tracksuit, hair damp from a shower. He smelled of soap and fresh sweat. He blinked at her, taking in her disheveled state, the shadows under her eyes.
“Aurora? What’s wrong?”
Wordlessly, she held out the journal.
He took it, confusion lining his forehead. He opened the cover. Saw the first page of meticulous French script. His eyes scanned it. Then they flicked to the margin, to her familiar handwriting in English. He froze. His breath caught audibly.
He leaned against the doorframe, as if his legs wouldn’t hold him. Slowly, he turned a page. Then another. He saw her drawings—small, simple sketches of a fox, a rose, a star. He saw her notes, her quiet, relentless understanding of him mapped onto the parable.
Minutes passed. The sunrise warmed the doorstep.
He turned to the final page, to her last note. He read it. His throat worked. When he looked up at her, his green eyes were glassy with unshed tears.
“You read it,” he whispered, echoing her words from the rooftop. “In French.”
“I wanted to hear it the way your mother read it to you,” she said, her voice raw from the night.
He stared at the book, then at her ink-stained fingers. The magnitude of the effort, the sheer, sleepless love of it, seemed to crash over him. A sound broke from him—half a sob, half a laugh. He dropped the journal carefully on the hall table, as if it were made of glass.
Then he stepped forward and pulled her into him, his arms wrapping around her so tightly the air left her lungs in a soft whoosh. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his shoulders shaking once, twice. He was silent, but she felt the emotion vibrating through him.
Suddenly, he bent and locked his arms under her knees, lifting her clean off her feet. She gasped, clutching his shoulders as he spun her once, slowly, on his doorstep, in the newborn light. He held her aloft, her face level with his.
“No one,” he said, his voice hoarse and fractured. “No one has ever…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. He simply held her there, suspended between the night she’d worked through and the day breaking around them, a secret, shared victory.
He carried her inside, kicking the door shut behind them. He didn’t set her down in the hall. He carried her all the way to the living room, to the couch, and sat with her cradled in his lap, her head against his chest. He reached for the journal on the table where he’d left it, opening it again.
“Read this one to me,” he said, his finger pointing to a line of her commentary.
She took the book, her stained fingers against the creamy page. She cleared her throat. “The prince tends his volcano. Even the dormant ones. Because you never know.” She looked up at him. “That’s about your temper. On the pitch. You think it’s a flaw. I think it’s just a volcano that needs tending.”
He laughed, a wet, genuine sound. He kissed her temple. “You’re mad. Brilliant, but mad.”
They sat like that for an hour, as the sun fully claimed the sky. He asked her to read her notes aloud, one after another, listening with his eyes closed, a faint smile on his lips. It was the most intimate thing they’d ever done.
The spell was broken by the sharp buzz of his phone on the table. It vibrated insistently. Callum ignored it, nuzzling her hair.
It buzzed again. And again.
With a sigh, he reached for it. His expression shifted from soft contentment to sharp focus as he scanned the screen. His body tensed beneath hers.
“What is it?” she asked, sitting up.
He showed her the phone. A news alert. A grainy, zoomed-in photo filled the screen. It was them. On the rooftop last night. The fairy lights were a blur, but their figures were clear: Callum kneeling by her chair, her hands on his face, their foreheads touching.
The headline screamed: NORDSKOV’S SECRET ROOFTOP ROMANCE! Who Is the Mystery Woman?
Aurora’s stomach dropped. The cozy world of candlelight and handwritten notes evaporated.
Callum’s jaw tightened. He looked from the photo to her face, which had gone pale. “It was only a matter of time,” he said quietly, but there was a storm in his eyes. He pulled her closer. “I’m not hiding you.”
She stared at the pixelated version of their private moment, now splashed across the internet. The sanctuary they’d built, first in his living room, then under the stars, now had a crack in its walls. The outside world had found its way in.
She took a deep breath, her fingers curling into the fabric of his track jacket. “I know,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it. The fear was there, cold and slick, but underneath was a solid core of certainty. “Let them look.”
But the phone buzzed again in his hand, this time with a call. His agent’s name flashed on the screen. The real world wasn’t just looking. It was calling.