There were a lot of things happening all at once, which was the excuse she gave herself for not being more careful in how she had responded to the first letter. She'd just been thinking about the Witch Weekly article, and juggling half a dozen letters from Lachlan MacFusty and a conversation with Camilla Lytton about it and just trying to keep things in the air, so she hadn't had time to really pay any attention to the unexpected letter from Kieran Abernathy. All she had processed, really, was that her scheme was working, and this was evidence of it. People who barely knew her were reading the article and making favorable impressions. Granted, Mr. Abernathy had already met her once before and had reason to think charitably of her, but it was a good sign all the same, and a more solid one than Camilla saying she would never believe Juliana was having an affair with Lachlan MacFusty. Her focus, in responding, had only been to sound suitably like a woman who had been surprised and embarrassed by the article in Witch Weekly, which she thought she'd succeeded at.

By Tuesday, when she'd received the second letter, it stood out to her more. Maybe it was because she was a little less adrenaline-fueled by that point, or maybe it was because he'd been talking about Marlowe Forfang, in his letter (after she had asked him, of course, but still), or maybe it was that she'd made a trip to her Diagon Alley post office box on Tuesday morning to retrieve the letters relating to her research. It struck her, though, enough that she didn't reply right away, but rather kept the letter in her pocket until she'd returned home for the evening. She pulled out the last letter she'd received from him, the one that he'd sent to Marlowe Forfang, care of publishers. She tried to remember everything she could about her meeting with him in the bookshop. Juliana had a good memory, but February had been a rather hectic month, so the details didn't all return to her right away. He had a lot of opinions on werewolves — that meant nothing, almost everyone did, to some degree. His opinions were actually reasonable and interesting — that also meant nothing, because as he'd pointed out in the first letter he'd written to Marlowe Forfang he typically covered these sorts of stories, so he had more exposure to lycanthropy than the average person might. He had scars on his wrist that she'd seen just for a moment, and she hadn't seen them clearly enough to know what they were scars from, but — scars.

Her second letter she'd tried to alter her handwriting, and she'd stolen a piece of her mother's stationary to write it on — she didn't know who he was to her, yet, but she was determined to figure it out, and she didn't want him to beat her to it. As soon as she'd gotten home on the third, she'd gotten out her collection of research letters. She saved everything anyone sent her, carefully catalogued. Each subject had a pseudonym, and a file full of their letters in date order. And there was the book: a notebook she had begun nearly a decade ago and had to keep adding pages to, which contained all the mentions of various subjects for her research, so that she could pull the letters out when she was writing her results and reference them again. It started with rudimentary codes, broad topics. Night they were bitten: A3, MacLeod27, Rowan12, Lee7... By the end, when she'd had to add pages, the topics themselves had become complex, and the annotations below them more chaotic. Guilt, hypothetical scenarios, specifically relating to transformation nights, involving loved ones compared to Guilt, actual happenings, collateral relationship damage.

It hadn't taken her long to find the right record. It was near the front, and it was one of the ones she added to most frequently, and besides that — she'd had a feeling, anyway. She could have pulled out any letter, but she chose one from Christmas eve, which had quite the collection of codes attached to it, in small, neat ink. Guilt, hypothetical, loved ones taking risks. Capitalization as a way to distance lycanthropy from sense of self. Use of neutral pronoun for lycanthropic form. Relationship between world at large and those afflicted with lycanthropy (general; negative). Relationship between someone with lycanthropy and a Confidante (specific, positive, current). Relationship between multiple people with lycanthropy (positive, current). Skepticism about future. Mentions of academia. Skepticism about academia — et cetera.

It had the word Forfang in it, and the handwriting was identical. This alone, of course, could not be considered proof, but there were other things, too. The way A put a dash in their letters to mimic a conversational pause, in a sentence that did not require any punctuation whatsoever — that was something the reporter had done, too. And, of course, the obvious: A, Abernathy. She pulled out the whole stack of letters she'd received from him since Christmas Eve, and skimmed through them again. The ideas were similar, too, to what she could recall from her conversation in the bookstore with Mr. Abernathy. The more she read, the more convinced she became that she had it right — but still, she could not jump to such a conclusion only by comparing handwriting and some grammatical ticks. And she could not think of any reasonable way to ask Mr. Abernathy to send her a lock of his hair, so that she could compare to the sample from A which was still tucked into an dated envelope at the front of his file.

So: testing the hypothesis. She felt a little bad for lying to him about the hair, right off the bat, but even worse admitting that she had needed to put her research on the back burner for the past two weeks. For one thing, it might tip him off, if he was already thinking about the exploits of poor Miss Binns since Valentine's Day (though she doubted he was keeping it that much in mind, honestly, no matter how much he had enjoyed their conversation at the bookshop); for another, she didn't want to admit to someone for whom this situation was always at the forefront of their mind, and always critical, and always time-pressing, that she had just... gotten too busy to deal with it.

She'd gotten a reply the same day, which at first excited her. He'd given her very little to go on, but it did seem to fit a reporter — but no sooner had she decided this than she received his second letter, where he said (under his real name of Mr. Abernathy) that he would respect Marlowe Forfang's privacy and not pursue him if he did not want to give interviews. Oh. This had, admittedly, put her out a little — not because she relished the thought of being pursued by a reporter, even one so amiable as Mr. Abernathy, but rather because it had never occurred to her that someone would do that — stop trying to figure something out, when they still had clues to work with. It made her feel guilty for having spent so much of her evening yesterday re-reading his letters. Was this just another version of her ill-advised stake-out when she'd handed off the rabbit?

She struggled with her response. She wrote to A first, and rewrote a line several times as she tried to describe how much the file full of letters on her desk meant to her. She wasn't sure why she included the bit about the flowers in the trees, but left it in just the same. She almost didn't return his letter under his own name — she thought she had said everything she wanted to say — but remembered that he didn't know he was writing to the same person, and it would seem strange if she just suddenly stopped responding. She hadn't really anticipated a response from either letter, though, but they came — one following the other, and his last letter ending with a question which was a consistent habit of his.

March 6th: Thank you - and for what it's worth, I hope it's obvious that I trust you.
March 7th: it's just that this area is so sensitive that I think it requires some delicacy to report on. Does that make sense?