Page 16 of Infamous

We never exchanged names. Never talked about the past. We just existed side by side as two people keeping their ghosts close.

For weeks, I watched her. But it wasn’t like before. This wasn’t strategy. It was curiosity I couldn’t shake. She was a mystery the world kept saving, and I didn’t know why.

One afternoon, I lingered in the doorway. She sat alone, same seat, same cup between her hands. The neon light outside flickered through the window, cutting her face in flashes of red and white.

Her hair was loose, a little messy, her eyes tired. She didn’t look like a monster. She didn’t look like someone who’d ruined a life. But I’d stopped believing in appearances long ago.

I took my seat. Watched. Waited.

She didn’t look up. Just stared into her drink, shoulders drawn tight like she was bracing for something that never came. For a second, I wondered if she felt it too, that magnetic pull between us. The thing that had kept her alive this long.

The space between us felt fragile, too easy to break if I pushed, so I said nothing. I’d learned how to wait—how silence could do more work than words ever could.

She finally looked up. Not startled or curious. Just aware. Her eyes met mine, steady and unreadable.

“You come here a lot,” I said.

Her lips curved, faint but not unfriendly. “So do you.”

Her voice was soft, lower than I expected. Controlled. It hadthat practiced calm of someone who’d learned to hide behind the walls they’d built around themself.

“Coffee’s good,” I said.

She studied me for a moment, like she was measuring her words before she spoke and how far she wanted to take the conversation. “It’s the best in the city, I think.”

I tried for a smile, but she didn’t notice because she lowered her head until her eyes were fixated on her cup again.

The barista called another order. Steam hissed from the machine. The world went on around us like it didn’t care we were building something dangerous in its corner.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “There’s no scenario in this world where you need to know my name.”

Her response confuses me. “Why’s that?”

“Names make things complicated.”

“Maybe I like complicated.”

“I don’t,” she said, eyes dropping back to her cup. But there was a flicker—something in the way her shoulders eased. Like she wasn’t ready to leave yet.

So I stayed.

We didn’t speak again for the rest of that afternoon. We just sat there, breathing the same stale air, our elbows almost touching. When she got up to leave, she paused beside me.

“I guess I’ll see you around,” she said.

The words shouldn’t have meant anything.

But as she walked out, I realized they did.

Every plan I’d made, every line I’d drawn, started to blur.

She wasn’t supposed to survive this story.

But fate, once again, had other plans.

Every timeI closed my eyes, I saw her sitting there in that cafe. I saw the steam from her cup, the faint tremor in her hands, the calm that didn’t match her eyes. It was an image sketched into my psyche that I just couldn’t shake. She was supposed to be another name on a list. Another job finished. But the thought of her didn’t sit like the others. It didn’t burn. It lingered.