For the rest of that day, nothing felt real.
Not the late hospital rounds. Not the lecture about cardiac rhythms. Not even the moment Kara grabbed her arm in the hallway and hissed, "YOU MET HIM?!"
Lianne nodded slowly, her heart still trying to catch up with itself. "We talked. He... wrote something."
Kara blinked. "In your notebook?"
"Yeah."
"And?"
"It was messy."
"And?"
"I liked it."
It didn't take long before the whispers started. Maybe someone had seen them walking together outside the library. Maybe it was the way Callan had started sitting a little closer to her in class, no longer hiding behind the safety of space.
The thing was, they weren't together.
Not yet.
They hadn't gone out. They hadn't held hands. They hadn't even messaged each other. Everything still lived between pages and stolen glances.
It was a slow-burning storm.
But one night, during a case conference review, Lianne noticed Callan was scribbling something on his logbook - not notes, but a folded piece of paper.
He slipped it across the table like it was contraband.
She unfolded it quietly under her review handout:
"Do you ever think about what would've happened if I never copied your handwriting?"
She smiled.
On the back of her own cheat sheet, she wrote:
"Maybe I'd still be wondering why the quiet guy kept looking at me during vitals check."
He looked at her after reading it - and for the first time, she saw it.
The real him.
Not just the letter-writer. Not just the mystery. But Callan.
The boy who borrowed her voice until he found his own.