"She said yes before she knew what no would feel like."
—Ethan
⸻
Ethan
The train cut through the fields like a silver wound. I watched from the window as the horizon bent, faded, then fractured into vertical lines of steel and glass.
June sat across from me. Her reflection shimmered in the glass—double-exposed, blurred, stitched together with glimpses of sky and the fast-passing shapes of towns she didn't name. Her hands rested on her lap, clutching a worn canvas bag. Her jacket still smelled faintly of dust and woodsmoke, though the city would bleach it soon enough.
I asked her if she was nervous.
She said, "Not yet."
But I saw it in her eyes—how they flinched at the sudden shriek of tunnels, how she tilted slightly away when a businessman brushed past her with coffee and cologne. Still, she didn't say no.
She said yes when I told her I was leaving Madison Hollow. Said yes again when I asked if she wanted to come. She said it quietly, like the word belonged to someone else.
⸻
New York rose like a fever dream.
Steel towers reflected each other endlessly—like mirrors unsure of what they were meant to show. We emerged from Penn Station into a canyon of sound and movement. Horns blared. Lights pulsed. Language bent and twisted into new shapes on foreign tongues.
June didn't speak.
But she didn't run either.
That night, in my apartment—one-bedroom, too bright, barely lived-in—I watched her stand by the window, watching the red eye of a plane blink across the skyline. Neon shadows painted her shoulders, turned her into something surreal.
Her voice, soft:
"This city looks like it's always mid-sentence."
⸻
Flashback – Madison Hollow
A week before we left, she asked why I was going.
I didn't lie, but I didn't tell the whole truth.
"There's a job. A gallery. They want the series I took of you—of the town."
She nodded.
But then she said, "So they want your view of me."
She had a way of cutting things open with very few words.
I looked at her, at the chipped enamel mug in her hand, the edge of her fingernail stained with berry juice. I didn't say she was the only thing in that place I couldn't reduce to a photo.
I just said, "I want to start something. And I want you to be part of it."
⸻
June
The city was loud in ways I didn't have a name for.
It hummed beneath the floorboards, above the ceiling, inside my teeth. I thought it might stop at night, but it never did. Even dreams had traffic here.
But I tried.
I folded my clothes smaller, wore my hair up. I followed Ethan to gallery openings where the wine was too sharp and the people too loose. I smiled when strangers told me I looked "real," whatever that meant.
And in the quiet hours—when Ethan slept like someone who belonged—I sat by the window and whispered home into the glass.
No one answered.
⸻
Ethan
I was intoxicated with the idea of transformation.
I thought: maybe I could save her from the dust. Recast her in better light. I thought about how she looked that first day—standing at the edge of the wheat fields like someone already mourning something.
Here, she laughed more. Or tried to. She wore my clothes sometimes, read things out loud she didn't understand, kissed me like she wanted to believe we were already permanent.
But the city didn't soften her.
It made her sharper in secret places.
⸻
June
The day I nearly left, I stood at the subway stairs and watched the train blur past.
I thought about the mine. About the cave-in. About how silence could collapse around you without warning.
I thought about how I'd followed him here because he asked.
And because I didn't know how to ask myself to stay behind.