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The first note appeared on a Thursday, tucked beneath the edge of Mike's keyboard like something that had crawled there in the night and died. He almost didn't notice it at first, too busy trying to locate the Riordan file that Harvey had asked for twenty minutes ago and that Mike swore he'd left right there, right in that spot, and now it was gone, and possibly this was somehow related, possibly someone had broken into the firm at three in the morning purely to steal a file and leave behind a folded piece of paper... that was a completely normal and not at all insane thing to think.
He unfolded it anyway.
You have no idea what you do to me, it said, in narrow, slanted handwriting that looked like it had been written by someone gripping the pen too hard. Every time you walk past my office I think about how easy it would be.
Mike read it twice. Then a third time, just to make sure he hadn't imagined the second sentence, because the second sentence was the one doing all the heavy lifting, the one that had his stomach dropping somewhere near his shoes. How easy it would be. Easy to what. The note didn't say. The note just let that hang there, open-ended and menacing, like the person writing it wanted him to fill in the blank himself and however he filled it in, it wasn't going to end well for him.
He carried it to Rachel's office at a pace that wasn't quite a run but wasn't not a run either.
"Someone's going to kill me," he said, by way of greeting, and dropped the note on her desk like it was radioactive.
Rachel looked up from her laptop, unbothered, the way she was unbothered by most of Mike's proclamations of doom because she had learned, over time, that Mike's doom and everyone else's doom operated on wildly different scales. She picked up the note, read it.
"Mike," she said slowly, like she was talking to someone standing on a ledge, "this is a love note."
"It says how easy it would be. Easy to what, Rachel? Fill in the blank. Go ahead."
"To fall for you? To tell you? I don't know, there are a lot of options that aren't murder."
"You're not accounting for context. I don't have friends who write me notes. I don't have anyone who cares enough to hate me this specifically." He started pacing, which he did when he was spiraling, back and forth in front of her desk like a man rehearsing his own closing argument. "This is targeted. This is someone who has been watching me. Watching my desk. Watching my patterns. It's reconnaissance."
"It's romantic reconnaissance."
"There's no such thing."
"There's absolutely such a thing, it's called having a crush on someone and being too much of a coward to say it to their face, so instead you write something dramatic and anonymous because it feels safer." She handed the note back to him, and he took it like it might bite. "Someone likes you. That's the whole crime here."
"That's not comforting. That's the opposite of comforting."
She just smiled, the kind of smile that meant she thought this was funny and she was not going to apologize for that, and went back to her laptop.
Mike stood there for another second before deciding that Rachel, brilliant as she was, had clearly missed the actual, glaring, obvious point, which was that nobody wrote him notes like that unless they wanted something from him, and the things people usually wanted from Mike Ross involved either his freedom or his kneecaps.
The flowers came four days later.
A bouquet, left on his desk sometime between his coffee run and his return, no card, no name, just a cluster of white and yellow blooms in a plain glass vase, pretty in the way that funeral flowers were pretty, which was to say pretty in a way that made the back of Mike's neck itch. He didn't even get close enough to smell them before his eyes started watering and his throat went tight and he understood, with the particular clarity of a man being poisoned, that these were lilies, and he was extremely, catastrophically allergic to lilies.
"They knew," he said to Rachel later, voice still a little hoarse, eyes still a little pink around the edges, sitting across from her in the break room nursing a paper cup of water like it was medicine. "They had to have known. Nobody just happens to pick the one flower that sends me into anaphylaxis. That's not bad luck. That's a hit list!"
"Or," Rachel said, stirring her coffee with the patient air of someone repeating herself for the fourth time this week, "they didn't know, because how would they know that, it's not exactly public information, and they just picked flowers that seemed nice."
"Nice flowers don't put me in urgent care."
"You didn't go to urgent care."
"I could have."
"You took a Benadryl and complained for an hour, that's not urgent care."
Mike set the cup down hard enough that water sloshed over the rim. "This is not funny."
"I didn't say it was funny."
"Your face said it was funny."
"My face is allowed to have opinions."
He wanted to argue further, had a whole rebuttal forming, something about pattern recognition and the statistical improbability of coincidence, but before he could get any of it out, Donna appeared in the doorway with the specific look she got when she'd already heard the whole story from three different sources and had opinions about all of them, and said, without preamble, "Chocolate's in your office, by the way. Whoever it is really has a type, apparently, and the type is things you can't stand."
Mike closed his eyes. "How do you know I don't like chocolate."
"Everyone knows you don't like chocolate, Mike, you've told approximately everyone at this firm at least once, usually while declining chocolate, which is a thing you do a lot, given how much chocolate ends up in this building."
"That's not the point. The point is that whoever's doing this knows it too. They know the flowers I'm allergic to and the candy I hate, and either that's an incredible coincidence, which I don't believe in, or it's someone who's done their research and is choosing things specifically designed to make me suffer, which means this isn't a crush, Donna, this is a vendetta."
Donna considered this for a moment, tilting her head, and then said, with the calm authority of someone who had seen every possible permutation of workplace intrigue and filed most of them under boring, "Or it's someone who's nervous and panicking and grabbing whatever's traditionally romantic without actually knowing you very well yet, which, incidentally, tracks with someone who likes you from a distance rather than someone who's been quietly assembling a file on your worst nightmares."
"That's oddly specific phrasing for a hypothetical."
"I contain multitudes." She turned to leave, then paused at the door and added, almost as an afterthought, "For what it's worth, if someone wanted to actually hurt you, Mike, there are cheaper and far less thoughtful ways to do it than gift-wrapped chocolate. Whoever this is put in effort. Bad effort. But effort."
He didn't find that as reassuring as she clearly meant it to be, and he said as much to the empty doorway after she'd gone, because that was apparently where his life was at now: arguing with people who'd already left the room, defending his terror to an audience of one.
Himself.
Because Rachel had slipped out of the break room too at some point without him noticing.
He brought it all to Harvey that afternoon, because Harvey was, in Mike's admittedly biased opinion, the only person in the building who might take this seriously, might understand that there was something fundamentally wrong about being targeted like this, might for once not treat Mike's genuine fear as some kind of amusing sitcom subplot.
He found Harvey at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled up—and he tried very hard not to think about Harvey Specter's forearms—deep in something that had his brow furrowed in the specific way that meant he did not want to be interrupted, which had never once stopped Mike before and wasn't about to start now—obviously.
"I need to talk to you about something serious," Mike said, dropping into the chair across from him without waiting for an invitation.
"Are the Riordan files done."
"This is more important than the Riordan files."
"Nothing is more important than the Riordan files, that's why I asked for them five damn days ago and I'm still asking."
"Harvey. Someone is stalking me."
Harvey didn't look up. "Congratulations."
"I'm serious. There's been a note, there's been flowers that nearly killed me, there's been chocolate I specifically hate, and every single thing points to someone who has been studying me, who knows things about me that strangers shouldn't know, and I don't have enemies, Harvey, I really don't, I'm annoying at worst, nobody hates me enough to run a campaign like this."
"Sounds like somebody does."
"That's not helpful."
"I'm not trying to be helpful, I'm trying to get you to finish the Riordan files, which, again, is the actual crisis happening in this office right now, unlike your secret admirer."
"It's not an admirer, it's a predator, there's a difference, and I'd think you of all people would appreciate the distinction given how much time you spend reading people for a living."
Harvey finally looked up at that, one eyebrow raised in the particular way that meant he was about to say something designed to end the conversation rather than continue it. "Here's what I've read, Mike. Somebody's got a crush on you and doesn't know how to show it, so it's coming out sideways. It happens. It's not interesting. What's interesting is that you're in here talking to me about lilies instead of at your desk finishing work that's actually due today, and unless one of those flowers was a subpoena, I don't see how this is my problem."
"You could at least pretend to care that I might die."
"I care that you will die if the Riordan files aren't finished by six." Harvey looked back down at his own papers, effectively closing the subject with the finality of a man who had never once lost an argument by simply declining to keep having it. "Go be terrified somewhere productive."
Mike left the office muttering under his breath about misplaced priorities, about how a man could be actively on fire and Harvey would still ask him to file the paperwork on the way to the fire extinguisher, and he didn't notice, because he had no reason to notice, the way Harvey's eyes lifted to track him all the way out the door, or the way something in Harvey's jaw tightened once Mike was gone, something that looked almost like guilt, if Harvey Specter were a man who allowed himself that particular expression in front of witnesses.
He was not a man who allowed himself that expression in front of witnesses.
Which was why, later that night, in the privacy of his own apartment, with the door locked and the blinds drawn and a very large glass of Scotch within reach, Harvey Specter was standing in front of a corkboard.
It was not a small corkboard. He'd bought it that afternoon, actually, from an office supply store two blocks from his building, standing in the aisle for a long, uncomfortable moment while a teenage employee asked if he needed help finding anything, and Harvey had said no, he was fine, he just needed a board, a big one, for a project, and the employee hadn't asked what kind of project, which Harvey had been grateful for, because he didn't have an answer that wouldn't have sounded insane out loud.
Now the board sat propped against his bookshelf, string and pushpins and index cards scattered across it in a way that would have looked, to any outside observer, deeply unhinged, and Harvey stood in front of it with his tie loosened and his Scotch in hand, reading his own handwriting back to himself and hating almost every word of it.
You have no idea what you do to me sat pinned at the top, a duplicate of the note, copied out in his own hand before he'd sent the original, because apparently even in the grip of whatever this was, some methodical part of his brain had insisted on keeping records. Beneath it, a card that read flowers—something meaningful, not generic, with a red line struck through it and a furious little note in the margin that said check allergies next time, idiot, which he had, unfortunately, written after the fact rather than before, a piece of information he was choosing not to think too hard about, because thinking too hard about it meant admitting he'd sent a man into a mild medical event in the name of romance, and that wasn't a thought he wanted to sit with for very long.
Below that, another card, this one for the chocolates, with the word classic written and then crossed out twice, because in hindsight, "classic" had translated to "the one thing Mike complains about at every office party," and Harvey had known that, actually, had heard Mike complain about chocolate more times than he could count, and some late, panicked part of his brain at the store had overridden that knowledge in favor of doing what everyone else did, buying what everyone else bought, because the specific, personal, correct gesture had felt too exposing, too much like admitting he'd been paying close enough attention to Mike Ross to know he hated lilies and chocolate and by extension know a hundred other small true things about him that had nothing to do with being his boss.
He took a sip of Scotch and studied the empty space beneath those three failed attempts, where a fourth card sat blank, waiting, because he was out of ideas that didn't sound like a threat, out of gestures that read as anything other than either horror-movie menace or Hallmark-card cliché, and somewhere in between those two poles was the thing he actually wanted to say, which was something along the lines of I don't know when this happened but I look for you before I look for anyone else in a room, and it's inconvenient, and I don't like it, and I don't know how to tell you without it changing everything between us, so instead I'm buying flowers like a coward and hoping you figure it out on your own, except that sentence was far too long for an index card and far too honest for Harvey goddamn Specter, who had built an entire career and an entire self out of never once being that honest about anything that actually mattered.
He picked up a marker, uncapped it, held it over the blank card for a long moment, and then wrote, in small, controlled letters, dinner. just ask him to dinner. He looked at it. It was, objectively, the simplest and most obvious solution to the entire problem he had manufactured for himself over the past two weeks, the kind of solution that didn't require anonymous notes or allergy-inducing flowers or any of the elaborate, coded theater he'd been engaging in instead, and he hated it immediately, recapped the marker, and didn't pin the card to the board, because if it was that easy, he would have already done it, and the fact that he hadn't meant something in him wasn't ready to have his name attached to any of it yet, wasn't ready to stand in front of Mike Ross and be plainly, unmistakably seen.
He finished his Scotch standing there, staring at the board like it might rearrange itself into an answer he liked better, and when it didn't, he turned off the light and left it exactly as it was, three failed romantic gestures and one true sentence he refused to send, and went to bed telling himself he'd figure it out tomorrow, which was what he'd told himself the night before, and the night before that.