Oh! Glad — that was even better than she'd hoped for, even in her most optimistic visions of how this meeting might have gone. She grinned widely, then turned her attention to her notebook and flipped back a few pages. "Earlier this month. After you wrote me. The handwriting." She'd lowered her voice slightly at this last, in case anyone was overhearing, because the handwriting wouldn't make much sense under the pretext of discussing some researcher neither of them were connected to. And if she sounded a little pleased with herself, well, she was. It wasn't as though it had been too obvious, but she'd put it together, and he wasn't angry about it, apparently.

With a flash of something like guilt (but not quite — she was still too pleased with this interaction to feel guilty), she admitted, "I started changing mine. I don't know if you noticed. That was a bit duplicitous, but — once I thought it looked familiar I didn't want you figuring me out before I'd figured you out. But you've got a very distinct way of writing, you know. The phrases you use and the way you use punctuation, particularly. If you know what to look for, anyway, it's very easy to see the connections," she said with a smile. "And then I did test the theory, of course, because I wasn't sure right away. But —" She had found the page she was looking for, where she had written her full name out across the bottom of the page. Biting her lower lip while she concentrated, she carefully tore the bottom of that sheet off and slid it across the table towards him:


"— there, you see," she said, tapping her finger over the M. "You'll recognize that."