I just let myself believe it. That someone had followed me into the dark just to be near, someone who saw me unravel and didn’t look away, someone who didn’t need me to be fixed or quiet or okay.
My chest ached around that thought. The soft, bruising kind that spread under my ribs and into my throat. How badly I wanted it to be true. My heart twisted painfully around that impossible hope. How carefully I held that feeling, like a small flame cupped in shaking hands, afraid that even a single movement might snuff it out. I imagined it was her. Still watching over me. Still loving me. Or maybe it was nothing. Just a shape I made from loneliness to keep the silence company.
My eyes fell closed, and I let the wind speak. Let the ocean roar. Let the idea of being seen hold me together. I stayed for hours.Because as long as I could pretend someone stood there with me…
I wasn’t completely lost.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 2
ANTHONY
The drive to Whispering Cove wasn’t long, but it felt like it took decades.
I hadn’t slept since David called out of the blue after eighteen years of radio silence. His number had flashed across my screen like a ghost I didn’t believe in anymore, and I’d answered before I could stop myself. His voice came through warped and fragile, like it had been scraped raw on something sharp.
“She’s g-gone… you should c-come.”
That was all.
No please. No explanation. Just those three broken words and the space between them. That heavy, breathing silence where grief lived now. I heard it there, in the places he didn’t speak. In the pause before the line went dead.
He hadn’t apologized either.
Not for the day he told me to leave. Not for the way his eyes hardened when he finally saw the truth I’d been failing to hide—the way my attention lingered too long, the way I watched her like she was something sacred and untouchable all at once. Whatever I felt had crossed a line long before either of us named it.
I had become something that didn’t fit in his world anymore.
I didn’t blame him. How could I? Loving her the way I did meant betraying him, and I loved them both too much to stay. So I left. It nearly split me in two, but I told myself it was the right kind of pain. The necessary kind. The kind that faded, eventually.
That was the lie I told myself.
By the time I rolled into town and checked into the Whispering Inn, the funeral was still hours away.
The inn hadn’t changed since the day I’d left. Chipped paint, salt-fogged windows, the faint smell of seaweed and old wood clinging to the curtains. It faced the beach the same way David’s house did, both of them turned toward the water like they still wanted to hold the world at bay.
Memories came in slow, unwanted waves: the day they moved in, their wedding, the first time Natalie pressed her newborn son into my arms with a laugh and said, “Be careful, he’s new.”Elliot’s tiny fingers had wrapped around mine like instinct, like trust.
I had belonged to that life once.
Now I felt like I was walking through it on borrowed time. I dropped my bag onto the warped floorboards and hung my suit in the narrow closet. Black pressed wool jacket and trousers. Dark gray tie. The faint scent of smoke and cedar and sea salt clinging to the fabric like a memory that refused to wash out. I shut the door too hard and leaned my forehead against it for a second.
Grief wasn’t always loud.
Sometimes it was a quiet pressure behind your ribs. A breath that wouldn’t quite leave your lungs. A name caught in your throat like glass.
I walked down to the shore, actively avoiding conversation with everyone I passed.
The sand was warm and fine beneath my bare feet, biting just enough to remind me I was still here. The waves stretched out endlessly beneath the low afternoon sun, indifferent and luminous. Waves rolled in with the same slow patience they always had. Time, in liquid form.
Each step I took left a mark that vanished seconds later.
I hadn’t come to forget.
I’d come to remember.
To stand witness. To honor a woman who had been too alive to leave the world quietly. To show up for the man who once felt like my brother and now sounded like he was unraveling in the dark. And—if I was honest with myself—I’d come for Elliot too.
