Marinette reread the letter she'd gotten from him most recently. Again, there was nothing that stood out about it to be significant to her. The paper was different than he usually used and she suspected that he'd gone to a shop to buy something to write on after she left him, instead of coming prepared to write something to her in the first place.

She briefly recalled that her parents knew his identity, but she wasn't willing to wait until they were awake to ask them. Even if she was, what could she possibly ask them? 'Who was the boy I went to the arcade with?' She never told them she'd gone to the arcade that night, and she wasn't certain how they'd react to the idea of her not knowing who she went with.

She came to a decision. If she didn't figure it out by morning, she would ask her maman who her 'secret admirer' was. She recognized that she'd denied that he was a 'secret admirer,' but if that would get her the answer she needed, she was willing to at least say it was the case.

For now, though, she was going to continue investigating as best as she could. Her attention got drawn once again to the note she'd put into the Theories column and she looked at the handwriting that she suspected was naturally his.

It looked familiar, and she wondered where she could have seen it before. If it was a writing she'd seen, but didn't know, she hoped that she could compare it to the multitude of writing samples she'd collected over the years. She pulled out the box of birthday cards, thank you cards, and 'get well soon' cards she'd gotten and looked at them one-by-one.

The first note she'd picked up was from Kim, no matter how confident she was that he wasn't Chat Noir. The writing confirmed that she'd been right. Kim's was far messier and the size of his characters were much smaller than the ones she'd been looking at. Next was from Max, who had written, surprisingly enough, in cursive.

The cursive didn't look too dissimilar to the occasional cursive Chat usually used in the letters, but she was looking to compare how he'd written in print, so she didn't suspect Max's handwriting would do her much good. Nathaniel and Marc had given her a nice card the two of them had made together.

Each of them had written their own names. Nathaniel was written in all capital letters, the rest of the name smaller in size than the N. Marc's handwriting was one she was more used to, but not well enough to rule him out without the direct comparison. He looped the top of the letter 'a' which she saw that Chat didn't do.

She continued the search, comparing the writing to everyone who had been in her class when she was in collège. None of them matched, which was her worst case scenario. She took a deep breath and tried to think of where else she could have seen his handwriting. She knew that she didn't have a sample of Nino's handwriting, but after the number of times he'd been Carapace, she was confident that he wasn't the identity of her minou.

When she went through the rest of the box of letters, even finding a note from Alix's brother as well as one from Théo. She was happy to find that neither of their writings matched, but she figured she would have been happy with any answer she could come up with after what felt like days of comparing handwriting.

She looked at the clock, 02h00. She knew Tom would wake up in a few hours to prepare the bread for the day. Even if she could get the answer easily, she was still hoping that she would be able to figure it out on her own. She got to the last card in her box and couldn't help but giggle.

It was the card that she'd acquired when they were in Collège. It was Adrien's note, she recalled, despite the fact that it hadn't been signed. She compared it to the imprints on the letter and was unsurprised to find that it didn't match. After all, the 'love letter' was years old, at that point. Most of her other samples were recent, but not that one.

She placed that one from Adrien down on top of the other samples, in the center of the pile of letters she'd been getting from Chat Noir. She felt herself stop breathing.

Adrien's writing from when he was 14 years old didn't match the writing of the 19-year-old civilian Chat Noir, but it did match the rest of his letters. She reread the note from when they were younger and hoped there would be anything specific that she could compare. He said the word 'bluebell' and Marinette started digging through her stack from before they'd gone to the arcade.

As she thought, he'd used 'bluebell' as one of his pet names for her. She held the notes side-by-side and could barely believe how well the two of them matched. She took the 'Of course, princess' from the Theories column and instead taped up the love letter and comparative note she'd just found.

In the deductions column, she'd written her first point, 'Adrien.' She went back through her memories again and tried to recontextualize everything she'd learned from 'Chat Noir.' Of course, Tom would call Adrien 'son,' he was one of Marinette's best friends. Clearly, it wouldn't be suspicious at all for the two of them to hang out.

If Monarch was keeping an eye on her , that would make a modicum of sense. He was her boss and Adrien was a fellow employee, not to mention his son. That would mean Gabriel was Monarch, though. She looked at the letter she'd gotten from Chat Noir that day and reread it, trying to put it in perspective with her revelation.

She read it again… and again… and again. Every time she read it, she switched perspectives. Whether it was 'Chat' telling her about 'Monarch,' or Adrien talking about Gabriel, it read almost exactly the same.

She felt a tear well in her eye as she thought about the akuma attack when Cat Walker had shown up mad. It was on Adrien's birthday. Gabriel Agreste would have made the choice to send out an akuma on his own son's birthday and that made her feel an entirely new level of sick to her stomach.

Marinette was confident that the two were one and the same, no matter how much she found herself dreading that fact. It was convenient for her that she now knew, but mostly she just got frustrated with the man who was, unfortunately, her boss .