The taxi was already waiting.
Delphine could see it through the carved wooden screen of her hotel window — a dented white Dacia idling at the riad gate, its driver leaning against the door with the particular patience of a man who had watched tourists panic before. Her flight to Paris left Marrakech-Menara in four hours. Her suitcase was open on the bed, half-filled. And somewhere in this room, tucked inside a leather-bound hotel guestbook she had not meant to open, was a letter she was never supposed to find.
She sat on the edge of the mattress and read it again.
The handwriting was Lian’s. She would have known it anywhere — those careful, slightly left-leaning letters, the way he always pressed too hard on the pen, as if the words needed anchoring.
It was dated three years ago.
Three years ago, this same hotel, this same courtyard, the same tile fountain that murmured all night. She had been here with him then, briefly, passing through on separate work trips that had overlapped by two days — two days that had felt, at the time, like a gift the universe had accidentally left out for her.
They had not spoken since she left.
She had assumed he hadn’t tried.
The letter said otherwise.
—
Lian Cao had arrived at Riad Sultana the previous evening for a photography assignment — three days shooting the medina for an architecture journal. He had not known Delphine was staying here. He had not known it was even possible, the way certain impossible things seem to belong only to dreams until they’re standing in front of you in the courtyard, wearing a cream linen dress, speaking French to the front desk clerk.
He had stopped walking.
She hadn’t seen him yet.
He had taken exactly four seconds to consider leaving, walking back out through the arched entrance and requesting a different riad, any riad. Four seconds of serious, cowardly consideration.
Then she laughed at something the clerk said — that low, unguarded laugh she only made when she thought no one was watching — and the four seconds expired.
He stayed.
They had dinner in the courtyard. Awkward at first, the conversation circling carefully around the three years of silence between them, landing on safe ground: her translation work, his recent project in Lisbon, the food, the light, the way the hotel’s zellige tilework caught the lantern glow. The fountain played its small, continuous note beneath everything they said.
It was almost like before. Almost.
But not quite, because Delphine kept her hands very still on the table, and Lian kept his sentences short, and neither of them mentioned the night they had walked through the souks until two in the morning, or the morning she had left without waking him, or the months afterward when she had convinced herself it was the right thing.
—
The letter.
She had found it that morning, early, before Lian was awake. She had been looking for a pen in the small writing desk drawer and found instead the guestbook, thick with notes left by previous guests. She had flipped through idly — a habit, a translator’s compulsion to read whatever language appeared in front of her.
His name stopped her hand.
Lian Cao, written at the top of a page toward the back. And beneath it, not a guestbook entry, but a full letter. Addressed to her.
He had written it three years ago, on the morning after she left. Written it here, at this desk, in this room — the hotel apparently reusing rooms in rotation, the guestbook apparently never replaced. He had written it and left it in the drawer, not sent, not delivered. Maybe he had intended to mail it later and lost his nerve. Maybe he had written it only to write it, the way people write things they need to say aloud even when there’s no one listening.
She read it slowly.
He wrote that he had woken to find her gone and understood, in the particular way you understand things that hurt, that she had made a decision he hadn’t been part of. He wrote that he didn’t blame her. That the two days had felt like an entire season to him, compressed and vivid, and he suspected they had felt like two days to her. He wrote that he was going to let her go because she clearly needed him to.
But he also wrote: if I’m wrong about that, you know how to find me.
The last line.
She had read it four times.
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