Chapter Two
Two
“You’re still looking at that thing? Auds, it’s been a month.”
Violet shut their apartment door and tossed her keys onto the rickety old table near the entryway.
They’d found it in the street and painted it a bright mint green once they’d determined it wasn’t infested with bedbugs or termites.
Their whole apartment was decorated that way: filled with secondhand inheritances, thrift shop treasures, IKEA clearance items, found objects, and donations from family.
Well, from Violet’s, anyway.
“I know, but you weren’t there and you didn’t see his face, Vi. It was heartbreaking. I can’t get him out of my head.”
“You never figured out his last name? It wasn’t on his credit card? You would’ve run it every time he came in.”
“He always paid in cash.”
Audrey ran her hands over the cover of the little leather notebook Theo had left behind at the coffeehouse. She’d taken to looking at it in her spare moments, flipping idly through its pages while searching for clues to its owner’s whereabouts.
When she first picked it up, she’d expected it to be a journal, given the way he’d seemed to be writing in it.
But it wasn’t at all. It was actually a tiny sketchbook, covered in rich, hand-lettered art drawn in black ink.
Odd, incongruous words and phrases snaked along its pages, all in different styles, some calligraphic, some gothic, some blocky, others more sleek and modern or funky and futuristic.
Sometimes there were little numbers scratched beneath the lettered designs—some that were definitely dimensions, and others mixed with letters and paired with a hashtag.
She’d Googled them, and a few were either hexadecimal color codes or codes for Pantone colors, depending on the combination. The rest she couldn’t decipher.
Every so often, the word art was interrupted by a page full of abstract lines or curves, idle squiggles and incomprehensible doodles.
More often than not, there were full sketches.
Landscapes of Central Park in the spring, views of the Brooklyn Bridge, studies of architecture, pensive portraits of people on the subway.
Sometimes they were only rendered in black and white, messy and haphazard and experimental.
Other times, they were painted with layers of watercolors or filled in with pastels or inks.
All of them were beautiful.
Even the more recent ones at the back—despite the way the lines twisted and trembled.
They shook like his hands.
There was a marked difference between those and the ones at the front.
“He’s gotta be an artist or a designer or something, right?
” she muttered to herself, turning a page and tilting the journal to look at the design there.
This one was another hand-lettered piece, and it took up an entire sheet, curling along it horizontally in a smooth, sweeping cursive.
It read “The Cherry Stem,” and it incorporated a little photorealistic sketch of a pair of cherries with their stems twisted into a heart shape around the words.
“If he is, I should be able to find his portfolio.”
“Yeah, but how long have you been looking?” Violet plopped down on the couch next to her and rested her head on Audrey’s shoulder with a sigh.
“I think you’ve sorted through half of the Theos in New York on Facebook and Instagram, and still you haven’t found a trace of him.
I’m betting he’s one of those guys without social media.
If he’s as skittish as you say, I don’t think he’s going to like attention.
” She peered at the design. “And it could be a hobby. Not every creative pursuit has to be monetized.”
“You’re probably right.” She picked at the edges of the notebook with her nail. “Do you think he’s local to the coffeehouse? Maybe he lives nearby. Maybe I’ve been casting too wide a net.”
“Didn’t he always come in at the same time?”
“Yeah. Eight seventeen, every morning.”
“That’s awfully specific.” Violet hummed. “Maybe he does live close by—maybe that’s how long it takes him to walk there from his building? Or ride the train? Seems too exact to be anything random.”
“That gives me hope, then. I should start looking at property records in the area, see what I can find.”
“Way to be a stalker.”
“It’s important, Vi. Trust me. I feel it.”
Audrey rested her head on Violet’s and closed her eyes.
They’d lived together all throughout college after being randomly paired by their university’s roommate-matching system when they were freshmen, and it was the luckiest thing either of them could imagine.
They’d melded together immediately like peanut butter and jelly and had become almost instant best friends, even though Violet was at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study pursuing a custom degree in sustainable fashion and business, something Audrey couldn’t even come close to understanding.
Violet had graduated on time over a year ago, though, and she’d gotten an admin job at some fancy department store in Midtown.
Not the real dream of being a designer, but it was something in the industry, at least. And it paid the bills.
Audrey still felt odd sometimes about how different their lives—and their paychecks—were now.
It was hard not to feel left behind by all of her friends.
But she was thankful they could at least still afford to live together in their tiny, cramped apartment while she plugged diligently away at the last remaining dregs of her undergraduate degree.
She flipped another page in the book and stared at the graphic word art there for the umpteenth time. “I really hope he comes back.”
“You barely talked with him, though. He just ordered coffee and sat there. What makes him so special?” Violet stood with a sigh and went to stare blankly in the fridge. “I’ve never seen you fixate on someone like this before, much less a customer.”
“He’s really sweet, and so shy. You haven’t met him, but if you did, you’d get it.
” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“He was just…so different than my other regulars, and he was trying really hard to talk to me. I like him.” And then she scoffed and raised an eyebrow.
“And besides, don’t tell me you don’t know what it’s like to have a crush on someone at work, not with the way you talk about that Alastair guy. ”
Violet’s face darkened. “Don’t you dare mention that asshole,” she hissed. “That ginger twat won’t even give me the time of day.”
“And yet I somehow hear about him constantly.” She tapped her finger pensively across her lips. “Almost like how I talk about Theo.”
“Shut up, Audness,” Violet shot over her shoulder. “That’s not at all the same and you know it.”
“Oh, so you do get it, then?” Audrey purred, taking pleasure in needling her bestie. “Are you going to admit that I can read someone like a book at first glance and I know the sweet ones when I see them?”
Violet grabbed some leftover Chinese food and opened the container, plunging chopsticks straight into the cold noodles.
“Fine, fine,” she mumbled between bites.
“You see the best and the worst of humanity in that damn café. When are you going to quit? You’re too good for Déjà Brew, and that coffeehouse is way too cool for half of that clientele. ”
Audrey sighed and sank back onto the couch cushions. “I’ll leave it behind when I graduate and get a big-girl job. And besides, at least my boss is never around. Tim pretty much lets us do whatever we want during our shifts as long as we make good coffee and make him money. It’s not so bad.”
She turned back to the notebook and ran her fingers over the pages again. She’d already done it a thousand times this month, but maybe once more would finally unlock some information she could use. Maybe she could simply magically absorb information from it through her fingertips.
“Actually, that’s a good point,” Violet said with a jab of the chopsticks.
“Where are you going to start applying for jobs? You’re not going to leave me, are you?
” Violet threw herself into their ratty armchair across from her, one so well used and well-worn that it was a sight to behold but also easily the most comfortable piece of furniture either of them owned.
Sometimes it wasn’t just about looks; it was something’s character that mattered most. “You can’t leave New York. ”
“I don’t want to ever leave you, don’t worry.
And I love New York. This city was always my dream.
” Audrey turned to the last page. It was blank, just as it always was.
Theo hadn’t quite filled up this notebook, which was at least half of why she wanted to get it back to him.
He probably had so many more beautiful things to draw in it.
But today, she noticed something different, and she raised an eyebrow as she ran the paper between her fingers. It was thicker than it should have been compared to all the other pages. How had she never realized that before?
She rubbed the corner of the page between her thumb and forefinger. It loosened and cracked, finally coming apart to reveal that two pages had been stuck together. She turned to the actual last page in the journal and then held a hand to her mouth as she gasped.