The hinges on the front door creaked loudly as Halt opened it and entered the cabin. Everything was still and quiet and empty. Will was still gone on the village patrols, though Halt presumed he would be home soon.
As Halt closed the door behind him, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He turned and noticed a small envelope sitting on the windowsill, a red wax seal glinting in the harsh setting sunlight.
He walked over and immediately recognized the seal imprinted in the wax—a laurel branch.
Halt was never one to get excited about things, but seeing the little seal made him almost want to smile. He picked it up and opened it to find a short note written to him in the most elegant hand he'd ever known, a hand he could recognize anywhere.
Halt,
Was nearby and am hoping you are well.
It wasn't the first anonymous note Halt had happened upon in recent months, but it was just as short and plain as all the others because, as Pauline knew only all too well, that was the way Halt liked it. And deep down, it touched him in a way few other things did or even could. It was a reminder that someone cared enough to leave a note. A reminder that someone was there for him whenever he needed them. A reminder that someone loved him as much now as they had twenty years before. It was a quiet love, but that was the love he needed. And there was only one person knew how to speak it.
Halt felt childish, reading the note again and again, but he couldn't help it.
After the fourth time, he grabbed a piece of parchment and a stylus off the desk and quickly scrawled his own note of the same sort.
Pauline,
Abelard greets you.
When Pauline returned to her quarters the following afternoon, she was greeted with a note on her chair. How Rangers managed to get further into a room than a mere arm through a window, she would never know, and had learned not to think about.
He's running out of things to say, she thought as she read the note and smiled to herself.
No doubt he couldn't think of anything better that he hadn't already used. After all, how was he to know that giving her a secret note one night would turn into months of notes written back and forth between them—always too caring to be those of mere friends, but also too bland to be anything more. It was the weird atwix they'd been living in all their lives. But with Will graduating in a year, Halt seemed to have begun having thoughts of something more—thoughts Pauline had, unknown to Halt, been quietly entertaining since they met. And in some odd way, these notes seemed to be a bridge to the More they both wanted to visit. Though all Pauline was doing was following Halt's lead, happy for once his lead was being directed by his heart and not that all to thick head of his.