Chapter 1 of epistolary exploration.

The letter arrives on a Thursday, misfiled, forwarded twice, stripped of urgency by the systems designed to contain it.

It is printed on cheap paper, usually reserved for drafts and forms people kept telling him to fill on the computer, but on this occasion used to provoke.

Dear Colleague,

I’m writing in response to your publisher’s inquiry regarding overlapping material in our respective forthcoming works. I suspect the concern is procedural rather than substantive, but I’ve been asked to clarify intent, influence, and—this is the word they used—proximity.

I don’t believe we’ve ever met.

I write under the name R. Hale. You’ll know the books even if the name doesn’t immediately land. Think: crimes, cities, violent in places people call theatrical.

If this is easier handled by lawyers, say so. If not, I’m available to sort this out over the next two weeks.

—RH.

He does not reread it after sending. He rarely rereads anything once it has left him.

The work, the sentence, the body—once it’s gone, it’s evidence, not possession.

Still, he notices, later, the phrasing.

I don’t believe we’ve ever met.

He could have written: we haven’t met.

He didn’t.

The reply takes three days. It arrives at dawn, timed either by care or accident. Holding it close to his face instead of reaching for his glasses, he realises it has been lightly scented.

Patchouli?

Dear R. Hale,

Thank you for writing. I agree the concern appears procedural, though I’m more interested in the anxiety that produced it. Proximity is an odd word to fear, suggestive, almost intimate, as if ideas might touch each other accidentally and be altered by the contact.

You’re right—we haven’t met. I’m attentive to first encounters; they tend to announce themselves in ways that feel disproportionate in hindsight, once one realises how much has been set in motion by something so apparently small.

I publish as E. Rowan. Poetry, essays, the occasional piece of prose critics like to call unclassifiable when they mean unsettling. If our work is brushing against each other, I suspect it’s because we’re both circling the same questions from opposite ends.

I’m happy to correspond directly, I have included my email on the reverse side. Lawyers flatten language, and I’d rather understand what’s being implied before it’s reduced to bullet points and disclaimers.

Warm regards,

E

He reads it twice.

Then a third time, slower.

I’m attentive to first encounters.

He notes the length of the sentences. The way they open, digress, return altered. He notes the refusal to reassure, the casual confidence of someone accustomed to being read closely.

He drafts three replies. Deletes all of them.

The fourth is shorter.

Miss Rowan,

Agreed on lawyers.

The overlap seems to concern depictions of violence that occur off-stage—events inferred rather than described. My editor thinks your recent essay creates “contextual interference” with a scene in my next book…I don't get it. But I’m willing to explain intent if it keeps this from becoming tedious.

You’re right about circling questions. I’m interested in what people do when they believe they aren’t being observed.

What leaks out.

The part they forgot to rehearse.

If you want to be precise, ask what you need.

—RH.

He sends it without softening the last line.

Precision is a kind of courtesy, he tells himself.

The reply comes that night.

Mr Hale,

Intent is always easier to explain than consequence, but let’s suspend that knowledge for the moment—it has a way of spoiling otherwise productive conversations.

You say you’re interested in what leaks out when no one is watching. I’m interested in what forms when someone believes they’re being read by the right person, when attention itself becomes a kind of pressure, shaping behaviour not through threat but through anticipation. The distinction matters more than it first appears.

That may be the interference your editor senses. You write absence like a threat, something stalking the edges of the page. I write it like an invitation, the way one might leave a door ajar: not quite permission, but a refusal to secure the room.

As for precision:

Do you believe violence is a failure of language

or its most honest form?

Ever pondering,

Miss Rowan.

He sits with that longer than he should.

Outside, the city is quiet in the way that feels staged. He thinks about the scenes she might mean, the ones where he withholds the blow, lets the reader do the work. He thinks about how often restraint is mistaken for mercy.

He begins to type. Stops. Starts again.

Why was she getting to him? Why did he care?

He closes his laptop, fingers lingering, then drifting to the unopened bottle of Diplomático in the desk drawer. Closing his eyes, he tries to shake off whatever this is.

He opens the laptop.

My dad was Mr Hale, HR is fine.

Violence is what happens when language stops being persuasive.

But it’s rarely honest.

It’s efficient.

—HR.

He almost adds What about you?

He doesn’t.