Alone.
The apartment stayed quiet. Empty.
I finished packing.
Tomorrow: the gym. HR signatures. Clearance. Freedom.
But late that night, when the lights were off and the city hummed outside my windows, I did the one thing I told myself I wouldn’t.
Eventually, curiosity—or maybe loneliness—won.
I clicked the email.
She’d written pages.
About love.
About regret.
About the way the world had cracked open and made her realize how fragile everything was.
If tomorrow isn’t promised,she wrote,then maybe we were wrong to walk away. Maybe love is supposed to survive mistakes. Maybe it’s supposed to hurt a little. Maybe we should try again.
She wrote about 9/11 like it was a sign. A reminder. Proof that holding back was foolish.
I read it once.
Then again.
I read it once.
Then again.
Slowly this time, like if I went too fast I’d miss the part where she stopped owning me.
My laptop glowed in the dark, her words stacked in neat paragraphs that felt anything but neat inside my chest. Love. Regret. Fate. God. The towers. The dead. The living. How everything could vanish in an instant.
If tomorrow isn’t promised…
If love doesn’t survive mistakes…
If we let fear win…
By the time I closed it, my hands were shaking again.
I lay down anyway.
Told myself I was tired enough to sleep.
I wasn’t.
I drifted in fits and starts, my mind snagging on her sentences, on the way she’d written my name like it still belonged to her.
And then the dreams came.
I was back on the boat.
Moonlight poured through the porthole, silvering her skin, turning her into something unreal. The harbor rocked us slow and gentle, like the world itself was breathing with us.
