The smell of black coffee hung heavy in Ella's apartment. She wasn't a fan of quick mornings, but she didn't sleep.
She sat at the kitchen table, contemplating the old photograph on the wall:
A group photo from a literary evening in 1998.
She was sitting next to a well-dressed man, holding a glass of wine, with a confident smile on his face—Leonard Graves.
She wasn't his friend, but there was a strange bond between them: a shared respect for something almost extinct... "taste."
Ella was a detective, he was a critic, and on one of her literary cases—about a writer who had died in mysterious circumstances—she had sought his advice.
Since that night, there had been a seasonal exchange of mail between them: books, comments, and suggestions laced with a rare sense of elegant irony.
But in recent years... silence.
Ella took the bus to Trent Park Library, where Leonard sometimes appeared after retirement, sitting there for hours, scribbling notes in the margins of old newspapers, ignoring everyone.
She entered the library and asked the old man sitting at the information desk:
"Has he been coming in recently?"
The man answered, without looking up:
"He was sitting there... table three... two weeks ago. He left this notebook."
He held out a small notebook to her, with a green leather cover. It didn't have a name on it.
She opened it and found its usual fine lines, no dates, just phrases like the echo of someone talking to themselves from the bottom of a well:
"It happens that you die before you die, when tastes become tasteless."
"They said: The elite died... no, they were killed. On a plastic table."
"I save the figs... because something is still worth chewing slowly."
That night, Ella returned home with a worry in her eyes that she hadn't known in years.
Suddenly, her landline rang, a tone unfamiliar since she retired.
She picked up the receiver.
"Mrs. Morgan?"
"Yes, who's calling?"
"You won't find a gun in his pocket, just ask about the unpublished letter."
And then... silence.
She slowly put the receiver down, her heart racing. She hadn't mentioned what she'd read to anyone. And no one had yet known about the notebook.
Now she realized she wasn't just chasing a strange death... but a letter someone wanted to bury under the ice.
9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQ7ATOm3AxU
