Half of Baltimore is solving your proposal. You never wrote it.
You build the Baltimore Courant's crossword: eleven years, no wrong clue. Saturday's clues spell a proposal to the stranger who answered you all year. You didn't write them. The reporter hunting him thinks you did.
Saturday, 6:40 a.m. Hot coffee on your wrist, and page C6 going gray under your thumb.
Read the first letter of every Across clue: WILL YOU MARRY ME SEVEN DOWN. The answers are yours. The clues are not.
Ethan Park, the new metro reporter, is at your back door with two coffees: "Nice stunt. So who is he?"
A TV van is double parked out front, your phone won't stop, and someone is knocking at the front door.
Eleven years building the Baltimore Courant's crossword, and not one wrong clue. For a year a stranger signed Seven Down has answered your grid by mail.
The new metro reporter: lean, black hair that needs a cut, rolled shirtsleeves, ink on his right thumb, a spiral notebook.
Someone at the Courant loves this story more than anyone. Keep reading.
Someone in the basement keeps Seven Down's box. Keep reading.
Someone in Fells Point is about to claim the proposal. Keep reading.
Morning radio host running #FindSevenDown: platinum pixie cut, red headphones around her neck, a denim jacket full of station pins.
A narrow galley in Baltimore: the radiator knocks like a pencil on a desk, and the percolator ticks.
You sign the grid Thursday night; after that only the editor's desk touches the page. Whatever prints in your grid is yours in the city's eyes.
A printed correction under your grid tells every solver your word can't be trusted. In eleven years there has never been one.
Anything you say on record is the next turn of the hunt by noon. Silence reads as yes.
You remember him falling tonight. He's alive, wearing the twin of your ring. At dawn, the Queen announces your engagement.
He is the prince of the kingdom you swore to hate. In forty-nine days the seventh trial needs one victor, or the truce breaks.
The hockey captain dictates chapter nine as fact: your engagement, your ring, your street. The publisher prints it in thirty days.
A jar of love in your vault has your name on it. The man who pawned it has no idea who you are.
