Twelve Minutes, in Ink

For almost a year, Nora Brennan had spent her Sunday mornings at the same corner table of the Blue Kettle Café, with a cinnamon roll, a large coffee and the crossword from the Riverside Courier. She was, by her own admission, rather good at it. Most weeks she finished in under forty minutes, and she did it in ink, which her sister considered a form of showing off.

Then, one rainy Sunday in March, a man sat down at the next table with the same newspaper, took out a pen and filled in the entire grid in roughly the time it took her to read the first five clues.

It would be fair to say that Nora did not take it well. The following week she arrived half an hour earlier; so did he. She skipped the cinnamon roll to save time; he finished first anyway, folded the paper neatly and left a generous tip. By May she had come to think of him as her archenemy, a word she used only half jokingly.

Had anyone asked, she would have flatly denied finding him attractive. He had untidy dark hair, reading glasses he kept pushing up his nose and a habit of smiling at certain clues as though they had told him a private joke. She noticed these things purely for strategic reasons, of course.

It was her sister, Claire, who finally put two and two together. "Nobody is that fast," she said over brunch, frowning at the paper. "Unless he already knows the answers." She tapped the tiny print beneath the grid, "By Sam Ellery," and looked him up on her phone. The photo on the newspaper's website showed untidy dark hair and a pair of reading glasses.

"He writes them," Nora said slowly. "He's been sitting there pretending to solve his own puzzles."

"Or," said Claire, "he's been sitting there watching you solve them. Which is arguably a lot more romantic."

Nora went back the next Sunday fully intending to have it out with him. To her annoyance, the table next to hers was empty. She opened the paper anyway, more out of habit than enthusiasm, and started on the clues. The answers came easily that morning, almost suspiciously so, and it took her a while to notice the pattern in the long ones running across the middle of the grid.

ARE YOU FREE. SATURDAY AT TEN. BLUE KETTLE. And in the bottom corner, crossing two perfectly ordinary words, sat a four-letter answer whose clue was simply "Fastest solver I know, apart from me": NORA.

She laughed so loudly that the barista dropped a spoon.

On Saturday she arrived at ten on the dot. Sam was already there, looking nervous enough to suggest he had been waiting since nine. "If the puzzle had been too hard," he said, getting to his feet, "I had a backup plan involving a cake."

"It wasn't too hard," she said, sitting down. "Twelve minutes. In ink."

"Show-off," he said, and pushed a cinnamon roll across the table.