I met him again under a sky so blue it felt artificially generated, like the weather had been subcontracted to Hollywood. He came drifting into the café courtyard with that improbable grace of someone who has never lost a fight with gravity. A bird — a jay, brilliant and loud — followed him like an unpaid bodyguard.
He didn’t bother with hello. He never does.
Instead he slid into the iron chair across from me and whispered,
“They opened the next circle.”
That was when I knew he hadn’t come for romance. Not this time.
Not for the kind of clandestine affection that leaves you smelling like citrus and regret.
No — this was reconnaissance.
I leaned in.
“What circle?”
He stared at the jay perched on the railing, as if checking whether the bird was wired.
“Circle Two,” he said softly. “The one they only diagram after midnight. The one they say shouldn’t overlap with the Red Circle… but does.”
I felt my stomach drop into my shoes.
I’d heard rumors — drunken murmurs from cab drivers who claimed to ferry bureaucrats home after ‘late nights at the office,’ and a backpacker from Santa Fe who’d sworn she once slept in a room where senators whispered like guilty monks through the vents.
But no one had ever said Circle Two out loud.
He took my hand — not lovingly, but like a courier handing off contraband emotion.
“Inside that circle,” he said, “they’re keeping files on the people who wander too close. Travelers. Journalists. Poets. Anyone who looks at blue skies with too much hope.”
Typical.
The government never trusted optimists.
“And what about you?” I asked.
His eyes flicked to the horizon — a horizon too clean, too carefully shaped.
“I saw the roster,” he said. “My name’s on it. And yours.”
I swallowed hard.
“Why?”
He squeezed my fingers.
“Because we know something about the next room. The one beyond this circle. The room where they hide guilt like state secrets.”
Before I could reply, the jay screeched, flapped once, and flew off — not casually, but in that frantic arc birds make when someone just opened a door they weren’t supposed to.
He stood, brushed past me, and said only:
“Meet me at dusk tomorrow. There’s one more circle. And the entrance… it’s not where you think.”
Then he disappeared into the blue, leaving me with the bill, a coffee gone cold, and the distinct sensation that I had just become a character in a story the government desperately hoped wouldn’t be written.
And naturally, that made me want to write it even more.