Work Text:
Andy Sachs had developed, over the past several months, a very specific relationship with her morning mail.
Mostly, it consisted of dread. The New York Mirror received enough strange correspondence on a weekly basis to permanently erode a person’s faith in humanity. Anonymous submissions. Threatening letters. Eight-page manifestos from readers personally offended by crossword clues. Once, memorably, a single shoe.
So when she arrived at her desk on Monday morning and found a cream-coloured envelope sitting neatly atop her keyboard, she assumed, immediately, that it was going to ruin her day.
But as she took a closer look… her name was written across the front in sharp, slanted handwriting she recognised instantly. Andrea Sachs. No one else wrote like that. The lettering looked expensive somehow. Judgmental, even in ink.
Andy stared at it for a second too long.
“Uh oh,” said Melissa from the neighbouring desk, not looking up from her monitor. “That’s either a death threat or a wedding invitation.”
Andy slowly picked up the envelope. “I think those are kind of the same thing in New York.”
There was no return address. Which felt… ominous. More ominous, unfortunately, was the handwriting itself, because Andy knew exactly who it belonged to. The handwriting was unmistakable. Sharp, elegant lettering cut across the front with the kind of aggressive precision that somehow managed to communicate disappointment in her as a person. Andy’s stomach dipped unexpectedly.
Emily.
Andy had not heard from Emily Charlton in nearly four months. Not properly, anyway. There had been one phone call after Paris, awkward and strangely formal, during which Andy had attempted to explain the clothes and shoes from Paris currently en route to Emily’s like some sort of peace offering from a deeply traumatised war survivor.
Emily had responded with a long silence and a clipped, “Well. I don’t know. It’s a huge imposition. And I’ll have to get them taken in. I mean, they’ll drown me. But I suppose I could help you out.”
Which, translated from Emily, had sounded dangerously close to gratitude.
After that, nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. About a week ago, Andy had missed a call from Emily late at night. There’d been no voicemail, just several seconds of muffled noise before the line disconnected abruptly. Andy had stared at it for a while before eventually deciding Emily had probably pocket-dialled her while verbally abusing an intern or speed-walking through Manhattan in unsuitable shoes. That had been easier than considering the alternative.
Though, there have been moments where Andy caught herself wondering whether she should reach out first. Which was stupid, really. Emily was busy. Andy was busy. That was adulthood. Plus, Andy had always assumed that Emily despised her.
Still, seeing her handwriting now sent something uneasy through her stomach.
“What is it?” Melissa asked.
Andy turned the envelope over once in her hands. “I genuinely can’t tell if I’m being summoned or executed.”
“Who’s it from?”
Andy turned the envelope over again, staring at her name. “Emily.”
Melissa immediately looked up. “Runway Emily?”
“There are very few Emilys who can make stationery feel judgmental.”
Melissa let out a startled laugh. “You still talk to her?”
Andy hesitated just slightly too long. “Not really,” she admitted.
And wasn’t that strange? For a while, back at Runway, Emily had existed in every part of Andy’s life whether she wanted her there or not. Barking orders across desks. Criticising her shoes. Appearing suddenly at her elbow with coffee requests and deeply personal insults delivered in the same breath. Andy had spent months being unable to escape her. Then she left. And somehow the silence afterward had felt stranger than the noise ever did.
Her thumb slid beneath the envelope flap before she could think too hard about why her pulse had started climbing. Inside was a folded sheet of paper, torn messily from what looked like a notebook. Andy frowned immediately. Emily didn’t do messy.
The first line hit her before she had fully unfolded the page.
Andrea Sachs is insufferable.
Andy blinked. “Oh,” she said quietly.
For one strange second, heat rushed to her face before draining just as quickly away again. Why does she need to let me know?
Beside her, Melissa frowned. “What?”
Andy kept reading.
- I hate your absurdly bright, wide-eyed expression. No one is that surprised by everything. It cannot be genuine.
Andy’s chest tightened.
- I hate your voice. It’s entirely too soft and far too sincere. One would think you’d learn to moderate it in professional settings.
“Oh my God,” Andy whispered.
It shouldn’t have hurt. Emily had said worse to her face, objectively. Much worse. Their entire relationship at Runway had practically been built on weaponised criticism and mutual irritation and whatever strange thing existed beneath it.
But this was different somehow. Because this wasn’t performance. This wasn’t Emily being sharp for sport, or defensive, or trying to survive Miranda Priestly’s office without emotionally combusting. And this definitely wasn’t Emily snapping at her over coffee orders or hemlines or misplaced garment bags. This was private. Deliberate. And somehow that made it worse.
Andy swallowed hard and kept reading anyway. Her eyes moved down the page faster now, dread curling tighter with every line.
- I hate your smile—those ridiculous dimples are deeply distracting and frankly, unnecessary.
Her mouth parted slightly. Distracting? Before she could properly process that, her eyes dropped lower.
- I hate that you took Paris from me and then had the nerve to come back with Chanel as though that settles anything and thinking I would accept consolation prizes. I don’t.
Andy’s chest tightened painfully. Paris. Right. Of course this was about Paris. Heat crept slowly up the back of her neck as memory rushed in sharp and unwelcome—the hotel suite, the clothes, Emily’s face when she realised. Andy had spent months carefully trying not to think too hard about that part. About what she’d cost Emily. About the fact that Emily had every reason in the world to resent her for it. And maybe she did.
Maybe this was simply the first honest thing Emily had ever said to her. Andy swallowed and kept reading anyway, unable to stop now.
- I hate that you are so relentlessly earnest, particularly toward people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.
Something in her chest pulled strangely at that. Not sharp enough to hurt yet. Just enough to ache.
- I hate that you have catastrophically appalling taste in men. Truly. That situation this afternoon was borderline offensive, and I refuse to believe that is the best you can do.
Andy frowned. “…What situation?”
“What?” Melissa asked immediately, openly invested now.
Andy ignored her. Her mind jumped briefly, confusingly, to David from accounting, who she’d had coffee with twice before gently deciding he was an immensely dull person.
Emily had seen that? Why did Emily care about that?
Andy looked back down.
- I hate that you are… competent. Annoyingly so. Irritatingly so. The New York Mirror is, regrettably, better for it.
She’s read my columns? The guilt twisted harder this time. Because beneath all the sharpness and insults and Emily-ness of it all, there was something else there now. Something raw enough that Andy suddenly felt like she was reading something she was never supposed to see.
The handwriting had deteriorated halfway down the page, neat lines collapsing into heavier, angrier strokes. Entire sections had been scratched out violently enough to nearly tear the paper.
Andy’s stomach sank. “Oh God,” she murmured quietly.
“What is happening over there?” Melissa demanded.
“I genuinely don’t know yet.”
And that was the problem. At first she’d thought Emily was angry. Then hurt. Now Andy wasn’t sure what this was.
- I hate your fashion sense. It is, objectively, quite dreadful and deeply questionable, in fact, and yet somehow not nearly as offensive as it ought to be, which is irritating in ways I refuse to examine.
Despite herself, Andy let out a small, startled breath of laughter.
Melissa narrowed her eyes. “Are you being bullied or flirted with?”
“I think both.”
Then her eyes dropped lower.
- I hate you.
Andy’s chest dipped heavily. Right. There it was. Of course.
Her gaze continued automatically to the line beneath it—Andy stopped breathing. The office around her seemed to recede all at once into meaningless noise.
Slowly, disbelievingly, she read the next line.
I hate you. I hate that I am apparently, against all reasons and professional standards, rather attached to you.
Andy stared at the words. Then again. And again. Beside her, Melissa was still talking, but the sound had become distant and warped around the sudden roaring in Andy’s ears. Because she knew Emily’s voice. She could hear exactly how this would sound out loud—furious, clipped, defensive down to the bone.
Rather attached to you. Like even admitting that much had physically injured her. Andy’s fingers tightened slightly on the paper. Her eyes dropped to the final section of the page. The handwriting there was almost unrecognisable now—hurried, slanting harder across the paper, ink pressed so deeply it had bled faintly through to the other side.
I hate that I fucking love you, and I hate that you are so pathetically oblivious that it makes me look like a complete fool.
Andy forgot, briefly, how to exist as a person. Something in her chest gave a painful little twist. Because she remembered leaving. Not the dramatic parts of it. Not Paris or Miranda or the phone in the fountain. She remembered smaller things. Walking out of the Runway offices for the last time with her box of things in her arms. Glancing instinctively toward Emily’s desk before the elevator doors closed. Waiting, stupidly, for one last cutting remark that never came. And afterward, every so often, still catching herself reaching for her phone whenever something ridiculous happened because some part of her expected Emily to be there to sneer at it with her.
Andy stared at the line so long the words almost stopped looking real.
“I hate that I fucking love you.”
Her pulse had become suddenly, alarmingly loud. Beside her, Melissa was still rambling on—asking questions probably—but Andy couldn’t properly hear any of it over the rushing noise in her ears. Because this could not possibly be what she thought it was. Emily Charlton did not write love confessions. Emily Charlton barely wrote complete sentences in text messages. And yet—
Her throat tightened unexpected, eyes dropping helplessly to the final line.
- And I fucking hate you, I fucking hate that you have absolutely no idea that I love you.
Andy stopped. Completely. The office noise blurred into a dull, meaningless hum around her as the sentence replayed itself in her head once. Twice. Ten times.
“I love you.”
Andy physically froze. The newsroom vanished around her. Every thought in her head seemed to collide at once in one catastrophic pile-up.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Emily. Emily loved her. Emily was in love with her. Emily had WRITTEN IT DOWN. Emily Charlton—who treated vulnerability like a contagious disease and compliments like acts of terrorism—had somehow written the words I love you down on paper and mailed them across Manhattan. Andy’s mouth fell slightly open in horror.
And then, underneath the shock, another thought arrived with equal force: was she supposed to be reading this? Because suddenly this didn’t feel like a letter anymore. It felt like accidentally walking in on someone mid-breakdown. The messy handwriting. The aggressive pen marks. The way the sentences became less controlled as they went on…this wasn’t polished Emily. This wasn’t composed, terrifyingly efficient Emily Charlton with her perfect posture and devastating one-liners.
This was something private. Something raw enough that Andy’s chest actually hurt looking at it. Had Emily meant to send this? The idea of sober Emily voluntarily mailing a handwritten confession across Manhattan felt deeply implausible. Well, she must have been drunk—just drunk enough to do something so reckless, so unlike the Emily she knew. Andy suddenly found herself thinking about the missed late-night phone call weeks ago. The strange silence afterward. The fact that there was no note attached. No explanation. No signature. Just this.
Andy stared at the page in absolute disbelief. Then, before she could stop herself—“Oh my God,” she whispered.
Unfortunately, she whispered it directly into a newsroom full of journalists. Loudly. Loud enough that half the newsroom looked up instantly. Phones paused midair. Keyboards stopped clacking. Somewhere near the printers, someone actually turned around in their chair.
Melissa whipped toward her immediately. “WHAT?”
Andy snapped the paper flat against her chest on pure instinct, face burning so violently she thought she might actually pass out. “Nothing.”
Melissa looked deeply offended. “That was not a nothing ‘oh my God.’ That was a discovering-a-body ‘oh my God.’”
Across the room, her editor leaned over his cubicle wall. “Sachs, you okay over there?”
“Fine!” Andy answered much too quickly. Which only made everyone continue staring.
Melissa’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Andy.”
Andy looked back down at the paper like it might rearrange itself into something less insane if she blinked hard enough. It did not.
“I fucking love you.”
A horrifying warmth was spreading rapidly through her entire body now, equal parts shock and something dangerously close to joy.
“Oh my God,” she said again, quieter this time.
Melissa looked moments away from climbing physically across the desk. “Andrea.”
Andy jerked the paper harshly facedown on her desk, cheeks reddening even more, as if that was possible.
“I think,” she said faintly, “I may be reading something I was never meant to see.”
Melissa gasped. “IS IT SEXUAL?”
“No!”
A pause. Andy looked back down at the page.
“…not exactly?”
Melissa made a strangled noise of frustration. “Give me the letter.”
“No, absolutely not.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I am not shaking.”
“You look like you’ve seen God.”
Andy pressed a hand briefly against her forehead. Because this was insane. Completely, objectively insane. Emily hated vulnerability. Emily hated losing control. Emily probably considered having emotions a minor personal failure.
And somehow, somewhere between anger and jealousy and apparently alcohol-induced catastrophe, she had written Andy a ten-item list culminating in a furious declaration of love.
Andy looked back at the final line again.
“You have absolutely no idea that I love you.”
A hysterical little laugh nearly escaped her. “Well,” she muttered under her breath, still staring at the page, “I do now.”