The wind blew harder that evening, carrying in a coldness that wrapped itself around the bones. Mara lit one of the old oil lamps still hanging in the cottage window. Electricity hadn't worked in years, but the flame felt more honest anyway — imperfect, flickering, alive.
She was folding a blanket to lay on the wooden floor when her foot caught something under the loose floorboard near the fireplace. A hollow clunk. Curious, she knelt and pried it open.
Inside: a faded leather notebook. Eliot's.
Her heart stuttered.
The cover was soft, worn by time and the heat of his hands. She hesitated before opening it, as if cracking it open might make the memory of him too real again — like he might walk through the door with that crooked grin and say something like "Caught me. I'm terrible at goodbyes."
But he wasn't coming back.
She opened it.
The pages were chaotic — lyrics scrawled sideways, smudged lines of poetry, doodles of constellations. But near the center, one page had cleaner handwriting, as if he'd stopped running just long enough to be honest:
Mara,
I think I'm drowning and you keep diving in after me. And that's not love — that's slow collapse.
You deserved someone who would swim beside you, not someone who always needed rescuing.
If I disappear, it's not because I didn't love you. It's because I did.
— E.
Her breath caught. Tears didn't fall — not right away. Just silence. Heavy and fragile.
She sat there holding the notebook, finally understanding: He hadn't left because he stopped loving her. He'd left because he didn't know how to stay.
And maybe that had to be enough.
The next morning, Jonah found her by the pier, sitting on a bench with her knees pulled to her chest, the notebook clutched in her lap.
"Looks like something found you," he said gently, nodding toward it.
Mara didn't look up. "He left a note. Hidden in the floorboards. Like a time bomb or a goodbye gift. I don't know."
Jonah sat beside her, keeping a respectful distance.
"You read it?"
She nodded. "He thought leaving was a kindness."
"Was it?"
She considered. "I think it was the only kindness he knew how to give."
They sat in quiet for a moment, watching the water slap against the rocks. A gull cried overhead. Somewhere in the distance, windchimes rattled like memories.
"I used to think grief was loud," Jonah said. "The sobbing, the breaking. But it's not. It's… the echo. The space someone used to fill."
Mara glanced sideways. "How long did it take you to stop expecting her to walk through the door?"
Jonah smiled sadly. "I'll let you know when it happens."
Back at the cottage, Mara placed Eliot's notebook on the mantle like an offering. She wasn't ready to burn it, but she didn't need to keep carrying it either. Not all grief had to be held in her hands.
She picked up her own journal. Wrote:
Love doesn't always end because it dies.
Sometimes it ends because it was never meant to live without hurting us.
She paused, pen trembling.
And maybe that's okay, too.
That night, she dreamed of the ocean swallowing the town whole. But this time, she didn't try to save it. She stood on the shore and watched it go, her feet planted in the sand, the sky above her breaking into light.