Henrique woke up with a numb hand.
It took him about five seconds to understand why—and then he felt the book beneath his fingers, the rough cardboard cover, the slightly wavy pages of something that had dried after getting rained on. He'd slept the entire night clutching that thing like a stuffed animal. Twenty-six years old. Congratulations.
The alarm went off at 6:15, as always. The crack in the ceiling was there, as always. São Paulo was making noise on the other side of the window, as always. Everything the same. Everything exactly where it belonged.
Except him.
Something had changed during the night—not anything big, not some cinematic revelation with a soundtrack and slow motion. It was more like when you move a piece of furniture two inches to the side and the whole room looks different, even though no one besides you notices. The apartment was the same. The routine was the same. But there was a book on the nightstand that hadn't been there yesterday, and that was enough to make the day feel slightly off-kilter.
He got up. Bathroom. Fluorescent light. Dark circles. The holy trinity. But this time, while brushing his teeth, he kept thinking about page 89. About the letters that had never been sent. About the "me too" written in the margin in hurried handwriting.
Who writes "me too" in the margin of a book?
Someone who has no one to talk to, his brain answered, without anyone asking.
Shut up, brain.
Coffee in the blue mug. "World's Best Son." Buttered toast. Through the window, the guy in the building across the street was smoking on his balcony again. Six-thirty in the morning. Every day. Henrique wondered if that guy also had a crack in his ceiling that looked like an island. Probably not. The guy probably had a real life and smoked on the balcony because he wanted to, not because he had nothing else to do.
He picked up the book from the nightstand before leaving. He hadn't planned to. His hand had simply gone over and grabbed it, as if his body had made a decision without consulting his head. He shoved it into his backpack—the backpack with the broken zipper, which now had a rain stain that probably wasn't ever coming out.
On the subway, he didn't open the book. He kept the backpack in his lap, feeling its weight inside, like something alive. Ridiculous. It was a book. Paper, ink, glue. It wasn't alive. It wasn't communicating with him. It was nothing.
But he knew where every underline was. He knew that on page 23 the line was shakier, as if the person had underlined it on the subway. That on page 41, the pencil had pressed harder, almost tearing the paper. That on page 67, there was a coffee stain—or tea, maybe—in the lower-right corner. That on page 89, beside the "me too," there was a fingernail mark, as if the person had braced their thumb there while writing.
Useless details. The kind of thing his brain recorded without permission and held on to for no reason.
Except this time there was a reason. And that was the problem.
At the office, Lucas showed up with his usual coffee and his usual face.
“So, did you survive the rain?”
“More or less.”
“More or less? Dude, yesterday was the apocalypse. I got an Uber that took forty minutes. Forty. The driver was blasting Brazilian country music. I almost asked him to let me out in the middle of the flood. At least I would've died in peace there.”
Henrique made a sound that could have been a laugh if he'd put more effort into it. Lucas didn't notice the difference. No one ever did.
“Something happen?” Lucas asked, this time actually looking at him.
Shit. Lucas had that irritating radar. He spent ninety percent of his time on autopilot, talking nonsense, and then suddenly switched on his antenna and noticed exactly what you didn't want him to notice.
“Nothing. I slept badly.”
“You always sleep badly.”
“Then everything's normal.”
Lucas narrowed his eyes, made that face that said, I know you're lying, but I'll pretend I believe you because it's Monday, and turned back to his computer.
Henrique opened his emails. Forty-three messages. Two marked “URGENT.” He opened the spreadsheet. Typed numbers. Did what he did every day, at the same pace, in the same order, with the same old numbness.
But the book was in his backpack. And the backpack was pressed against his leg. And he could feel its weight.
At lunchtime, while Lucas went to eat with the finance department, Henrique stayed at his desk. He said he wasn't hungry. Lie. He was hungry, but he wanted to be alone. He took the book out of his backpack and opened it to page 89.
“Me too.”
He stared at those two words as if they would change if he looked long enough. They didn't. They stayed there, small and cramped, written by someone he didn't know and would probably never meet.
And that's when the thought appeared.
It didn't come slowly. It didn't give him any warning. It popped into his head like one of those pop-ups you never asked for and don't know how to close: what if I responded?
No. No. That was stupid. Responded how? By writing in the margin of the book? For whom? The person who marked that book might have done it years ago. They might live in another state. They might be dead, for God's sake. He was going to write a response in a book and put it back in the book box, and no one would ever read it, and he'd be the lunatic who talked to books.
He closed the book. Put it back in his backpack. Went back to the spreadsheet.
He lasted twenty minutes.
He opened it again. Page 41. “At that moment, he didn't know that the search for something lost could be more important than the thing itself.” The underline was firm, deliberate. The person knew what they were marking. It wasn't random.
Henrique picked up a pen from the desk. Blue. Bic. The most boring pen in the universe. He held it in his hand, the tip two centimeters from the book's margin, for maybe a full minute.
His heart was racing. Which was pathetic. Completely, absolutely pathetic. He was having an emotional cardiac crisis over a Bic pen and a book without a cover. If Vinícius could see this, he'd have enough material for an entire other party.
Vinícius.
The memory came like a punch to the stomach. The laughter. The notebook. “Henrique's emo, bro!” The room full of people laughing at the things he would never say to anyone.
He dropped the pen. Closed the book. Shoved it hard into his backpack, as if he were locking away something dangerous.
No. He wasn't going to write anything. He wasn't going to expose himself again. He wasn't going to put words somewhere someone could find them and laugh. He'd done that once before. He already knew how it ended.
The rest of the afternoon passed on autopilot. Spreadsheets, emails, a fifteen-minute meeting that could have been a three-line email. Sérgio sent another “URGENT” that wasn't urgent. Lucas told a story about Tinder that Henrique listened to without listening.
At six, he left. Subway. Pinheiros Station.
The book box was there.
Henrique stopped. Looked at it. There were seven books today—one more than yesterday. Someone had left a copy of The Little Prince with a cover so worn that the fox in the illustration looked like an orange blur.
He stood there for maybe two minutes. People passed around him like water flowing past a rock. No one looked. No one cared. He was just another guy standing in a subway station, staring at a box of old books.
But inside, a war was raging.
The rational part said: return the book, get on with your life, forget this shit. The part he'd locked away four years ago—the part that wrote in notebooks, underlined sentences, believed words could mean something—that part was screaming.
He didn't return the book.
He didn't write anything.
He went home, heated up some instant ramen, ate it in front of the TV without paying attention, took a shower, and went to bed.
The book stayed on the nightstand. Again.
At two in the morning, he woke up. He didn't know why. He hadn't had a nightmare, there hadn't been any noise, there was nothing. He just woke up, as if his body had decided he needed to be conscious at that moment.
He stared at the ceiling. The island. The shadows. The silence of São Paulo at two in the morning, which wasn't really silence—it was just the noise dying down enough for you to hear your own thoughts, which was worse.
He reached out. Picked up the book. Opened it to the last page—the one with the tiny heart drawn beside the sentence about waiting at the door without knowing if you should knock.
And in the dark, with the light from his phone illuminating the page, Henrique took the pencil from the drawer of the nightstand—a crappy promotional pencil, the kind he couldn't even remember where he'd gotten.
He wrote beneath the heart, in small, cramped, almost illegible handwriting:
“I don't know if I should knock either.”
He stared at what he'd written. Seven words. Shaky handwriting. Pale graphite on yellowed paper.
His heart was pounding. His hands were sweating. He had just written in a book he was going to return to a book box in a subway station, and those seven words were the most vulnerable thing he'd done in four years.
If someone read it and laughed, he wouldn't know. That was the point. That was the only reason he'd managed to do it.
He closed the book. Put it on the nightstand. Lay on his back.
Tomorrow he'd return it. For real this time.
And what if the person who had drawn the heart never passed by that book box again? What if they did pass by and didn't pick up that book? What if they picked it up and didn't see it? What if they saw it and didn't care?
What if they saw it and did care?
That last possibility was the most frightening of all.
Henrique stayed awake until four in the morning, staring at the island in the ceiling, thinking about doors and people who stand in front of them without knowing if they should knock.
He fell asleep with the pencil still in his hand.