Still, I swing between bitterness and envy as I read her words, touching the photos of sun-bleached coastlines. I’ve never wanted to be like her, and yet everything about her life is what I’ve craved.
Freedom, untethered by a single thing.
Maybe I’m more like her than I’ve ever wanted to admit.
In one of her more recent letters, sent only a month ago, she describes watching a sunset over the Mediterranean, how a dog was barking nearby, and a woman was laughing, and how she felt completely alive. She ended the letter with:If you don’t risk getting hurt, then you’ll never feel a thing. If you don’t risk breaking your own heart, how will you ever know what’s real or not? I was wrong when I used to tell you to avoid love. I was afraid. Because if there’s one thing worth fighting for in this life… it’s the person you can’t live without.
I fall asleep with the late-afternoon sun still suspended in the sky, and I dream of him, while my mother’s words spin back and forth inside my mind. I dream he comes to the cottage, and we wade out into the sea, the sun winking off our salty skin, his lips pressed to mine.
I wake and throw back the bedsheets—hating the torment of my dreams.
Hating the days I can’t get back.
Time is cruel. It does nothing to wipe clean what I want to forget.
Days inch by, the hours coated in mud. Slow and merciless.
I tuck Mom’s letters back into the box, folded away, because her words won’t leave me.
I was wrong when I used to tell you to avoid love.
I don’t know what to feel. What to trust.
The evening is calm, the tide low. But my heart is a violent storm. So I dress quickly, needing to be free of the cottage, and I walk outside in my bare feet.
I could make my way down to the beach, stroll along the shoreline, but I don’t want to hear the sea. I’m craving something else. Silence. A place to curl up and hide.
The sky is overcast, heavy and gray, and a few drops of rain begin to soak the ground. I walk to the small greenhouse and slip inside, breathing in the wet, mossy scent. I stand among the plants, and the tears start to fall.
I want to shout, I want to scream until there’s no air left in my lungs, but I don’t have the strength. And there is no one to hear my pain. No one to mend me back together. I wipe at my eyes, angry for all the hurt still tangled up inside me, and through the blur of my tears I see someone walking up the stone path, toward the greenhouse. I quickly draw in a breath, not wanting Margo to see the tears in my eyes.
She pauses outside the door, and I think she’s going to turn away, head back to her house, but then the door pushes open, and my heart stops beating.
It’s not Margo.
The outline is too tall, too familiar.
He looks like the boy who ripped my heart in two. A boy from a town far away from here.
I must still be asleep in bed, letters scattered across the quilt.
He lifts his head, eyes as dark and paralyzing as I remember them.
Steady and sure, green and painful.
My mind has cracked, split in half, because he can’t be real—he’s a hundred miles away. The salt air is unkind and unfair. Maybe this town is haunted after all, crowded with legends and lore and cruel ghostly memories, just as Margo said.
But he takes a step into the greenhouse, the door closing softly behind him, soft droplets of rain scattering from his shoulders, his eyelashes. And every cell in my body knows that it’s him.
All my thoughts drain out of me.
He looks just as I remember: Dark jeans, a little rumpled, like he’s been traveling for a whole day. Hair damp from the rain, mouth trembling with all the words he wants to say.
My ears begin to ring.
“Lark.” Four little letters fall from his lips. Four letters that turn my beating heart in on itself. My body sways, and I reach for one of the planter boxes to keep me upright.
Four letters I never thought I’d hear him say again.
