“Why didn’t you take me instead?!” he hurled into the storm. “Why her?! She was the best of us! You took her and left me with nothing!”
I moved closer. Close enough that the heat of his fury reached me through the cold.
He clenched his fists, trembling, soaked to the bone. I stayed, the soles of my feet sinking into mud and sand, every fiber of me aware of him.
His breath caught. A soft whisper slipped past the storm. “Come back. Please… just come back.”
A flash of lightning lit his face, and in that brief silver glow, he shivered. I saw the tremor in his jaw, the way his hands curled in pain. I took another step closer, letting my presence press silently against his, like a wall he could lean on without having to ask.
“I… I’m here,” I breathed again, softly, almost to myself. Not a hero. Not a savior. Just someone who could stand through the storm beside him.
His lips moved as if forming words, but no sound came. His shoulders shook violently, but I noticed the slight slackening in his stance, the micro-movement that told me he sensed me, even if only barely.
We stayed like that. No one speaking, no one touching. just the thin, fragile act of not pulling away. The cliffs, the ocean, the storm blurred into background noise. All that mattered was the space between us and how carefully we were holding it.
One breath. Then another. Each one a small decision. Each one a thread, binding us together without hands.
When he finally tilted his face toward the sky, exhaustion ghosting his features, he whispered again, voice barely there, “Don’t leave.”
“I won’t,” I said, just loud enough for the wind to take it. Not so he could hear it, but so he could feel it.
It was like the cliffs held their breath. That was the moment I understood Elliot wasn’t just mourning her. He was lost—just like David—unmoored, drifting without an anchor.
I didn’t know whether I was strong enough to pull him back to shore. But I knew I couldn’t walk away. Because grief this deep didn’t need words. It didn’t need fixing. It needed someone willing to stay inside it.
So I did.
I stood with him in the rain and the wind and the wreckage of it, letting his pain pass through me instead of swallowing him whole.
“I won’t,” I whispered again—not to him this time, but to the promise itself.
I meant it with everything in me.
CHAPTER 3
ELLIOT
Ialways thought the nights would be the worst.
I braced for the darkness to swallow me whole, to leave me gasping in the hollow echo of my own thoughts. I expected the weight of my grief to press down hardest when the world slept, when there was nothing but shadows and silence to keep me company.
Strangely, it was at night when I found a peculiar kind of peace.
It wasn’t healing or comforting—just… stillness. In that quiet calm, memories surfaced like slow-burning stars. Flickers of her laughter. The way she used to hum when she thought no one was listening. How the corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled.
They came unbidden, soft and sharp all at once. And somehow, in that haunting familiarity, the agony dulled. Just a little. Just enough to breathe without feeling like I was choking.
But when morning came, it wasn’t the warm kind of light that filtered through the blinds like an invitation to start again. It was cold. Unforgiving. It illuminated everything she wasn’t a part of.
Every new hour felt wrong. Like time itself was betraying her memory. It had no right to keep moving forward when shewasn’t here to witness it. That’s when it hit me all over again. The unbearable truth wasn’t her absence from the past.
It was her absence from the future.
Every new day was a fresh wound. Every plan, every routine, every tiny, insignificant decision only reminded me she wasn’t there to share it. To argue about what to cook for dinner. To roll her eyes when I forgot something.
To exist.
And the house… my home had turned into a mausoleum of might-have-beens.
