Then his eyes found mine.
The room dissolved. The terrible music, the forced laughter, the streamers, the punch, and the fifteen years of silence, all of it faded into meaningless static. There was only the clear, direct line between his hazel eyes and mine, a connection that felt physical, like a thread pulled taut across the crowded gymnasium.
I couldn't move. My feet had apparently decided this was an excellent moment to root themselves to the floor.
What if he was waiting for someone who'd just stepped away? What if he looked at me and felt nothing but the mild awkwardness of running into an ex he'd rather forget? What if I walked over there and discovered I was the only one still carrying the weight of what we'd been to each other?
"Charlie." Beth's voice came from somewhere far away. "Go."
"I can't."
"You can." Another gentle push. "Go."
Miles uncrossed his arms. He didn't smile, but something in his expression shifted: a softening, a recognition, a question. He pushed himself off the wall.
He was walking toward me.
My legs started moving without my permission, carrying me forward through the crowd. I wove past Kevin Marsh and his boat stories, past Lisa and her gifted children, past a decade and a half of silence and regret and wondering what might have been.
We met in the middle of the dance floor, where no one was dancing. The space around us felt suddenly vast and private, like we'd stepped into a bubble that separated us from everyone else.
"Hi," he said.
His voice was deeper than I remembered, but the timbre was the same: that low, warm vibration that had always made me feel like I was the only person in the world worth talking to.
"Hi," I managed, the word coming out breathless and strange.
We stood there, just looking at each other. Taking in the changes, searching for the familiar. The lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there at twenty. The new gravity in his expression, like life had added weight he was still learning to carry. But his eyes, those hazel eyes that had always seemed to see right through me, were exactly the same.
"You look..." he started, then stopped, shaking his head slightly as if discarding inadequate words. "It's really good to see you, Charlotte."
"You too." The understatement of a lifetime. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."
"I wasn't sure I'd come," he admitted. His eyes moved over my face like he was memorizing it. "Green still suits you."
The observation, so specific, so connected to us, broke a barrier I hadn’t realized was there. "You remember that?"
"I remember everything." His words were quiet, weighted with something I couldn't name.
A silence fell between us, but it wasn't awkward. It was full, like a held breath before a confession.
"So," I said, grasping for solid ground before I drowned in the intensity of his gaze. "Law. You're a lawyer now."
"I am. Family law, mostly. Custody disputes, estate planning." He winced almost imperceptibly. "Sorry, that's probably not the most?—"
"It's fine. I'm intimately familiar with the divorce process these days." The joke landed flatter than I'd intended, and I immediately wished I could take it back.
"I heard," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It was... it needed to happen." I took a sip of punch I didn't want, just to have something to do with my hands. "So. The weather's been warm."
"Unseasonably," he agreed, and we both almost smiled at how terrible we were at this.
"We're very bad at small talk," I observed.
"Catastrophically bad. We always were."
"I don't remember it being this painful."
