The fire flared, bright and hungry, curling the shirt into ash with a hiss. Smoke rose in a twisting column, and Emma leaned closer, letting it fill her nose, her throat, her lungs. She wanted it inside her, wanted to swallow it whole.
For one desperate second, she imagined Olivia stepping out of the smoke, barefoot and grinning, the sun on her face and that look in her eyes, the one that said you see me.
But the smoke faded and the shirt was gone and Emma was alone.
She crouched beside the dying embers, one hand in the dirt, breathing deep and steady. She didn’t cry. She didn’t rage. She just let it hurt, let it live in her body like everything else Olivia had touched.
“I’m not done with you,” she whispered, voice low and hoarse. “Not even close.”
The wind shifted slightly, curling around her shoulders like a promise.
Emma stood slowly and walked back toward her cabin. The scent of ash clung to her hands. The heat followed her inside.
And though she had no map, no plan, no damn idea what came next, her coordinates had already shifted.
Emma tried to return to her usual rhythm.
She moved through the motions of retreat life like a woman walking inside the memory of someone else’s routine. She watered the rosemary and thyme each morning with practiced care, checked in on new guests whose names she couldn’t quite hold in her head, and stood barefoot in the sand while leading breathwork circles that once grounded her but now felt like echoes, soft and distant and no longer her own.
The view from the ridge remained the same, but it didn’t fill her anymore. It didn’t soothe. It only reminded her of what was absent, of watching Olivia disappear into the sunrise with the weight of something sacred tucked into her chest. Even the soil felt different beneath her boots. Not angry, not rejecting, but quiet in a way that unnerved her, as though the land itself had exhaled and taken its secrets with it.
The lavender had overgrown again. Emma trimmed it carefully, but her jaw tightened as she did, remembering the way Olivia had once tucked a sprig behind her ear and laughed, asking if that made her look like a local. That laughter lingered in the air some days, invisible and infuriating in the way it made her want more of it, even as it reminded her of what was missing.
She avoided the hammock on the east deck. It still swayed sometimes on its own, whispering of the night they’d lay tangled together, skin to skin, naming stars and kissing like the sky could collapse at any moment.
Emma wasn’t sure who she was anymore. Or maybe, for the first time, she was exactly herself—peeled open, unable to compartmentalize the way she used to. Olivia had stripped her, not in sex, but in spirit. With every look, every challenge, every soft confession shared beneath the moon. And now, Emma couldn’t wear detachment the same way. Couldn’t pretend the silence comforted her. Couldn’t forget the sound Olivia made when she came or the way her eyes had looked that last morning—wide open, certain, free.
She skipped lunch with Marv and missed two sunrises. Guests asked if she was okay, and she told them she was tired, which was true, but not complete.
Because it wasn’t fatigue.
It was grief.
And not for Olivia, but for the version of herself she’d been before loving her.
She found herself returning to the firepit where she had burned Olivia’s tank top. Just to be near the place where letting go had started. She sat in the dirt, sometimes for hours, tracing the edge of ash that had never fully blown away. She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She just sat with the weight of it all and let the heat wrap around her body like arms that used to belong to someone who whispered her name like it tasted good in her mouth.
On the fourth day, her phone rang.
She almost didn’t answer; it rarely rang anymore, but the name on the screen stilled her: Dr. Bridget Stephens.
She wiped her hand on her jeans and answered on the third ring. “Lang.”
“Still picking up like you owe someone money,” Bridget said, her voice familiar and fond.
Emma exhaled a small, startled laugh. “Some habits die slow.”
“I’ll get to the point. A donor with pull at Harrington Memorial is building a case for trauma-informed recovery models. I mentioned you. He asked if you’d consider stepping into a role at their rehab unit as a visiting specialist. Six-month term. High autonomy. Good pay. And, from what I hear, it has one hell of a view.”
Emma said nothing for a moment, letting her eyes drift to the ridge, the same one where she’d watched Olivia drive away.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Just surprised my past finally called with something that didn’t feel like a warning.”
Bridget chuckled. “Well, this one’s a door, Lang. Walk through it or don’t. But don’t pretend it isn’t there. Let me know when you figure it out.”
She hung up before Emma could ask a single question.
