Chapter 16
The silence between Elias and Amira began to shift.
Not the heavy, unspoken weight of grief — but a gentler pause. The kind lovers fall into when words are unnecessary.
Still, something stirred in Elias, quietly, like an unresolved note in a long melody.
He often walked alone along the cliffs now, sketching waves, muttering lines of poetry under his breath. When Amira asked what he was working on, he only smiled.
"Something I owe myself," he said.
One afternoon, Amira followed him without his knowing, and discovered where he'd been disappearing to — a small cove hidden between two jagged cliffs, unreachable at high tide. In its center, a stone bench had been carved into the rock. On it, a line was etched:
Grief does not end. It changes hands.
He had built it — for Selene, for Mirabelle, for himself.
When Elias noticed her presence, he didn't flinch or retreat. He simply said, "I never gave myself permission to mourn. Not properly. I carried it, wore it, fed it. But I never really let it speak."
Amira sat beside him. "And now?"
He opened a notebook, flipping to a single page he'd torn from his journal.
Then he read aloud:
To the girl I pushed away and the one I never stopped loving —
You became the light I see through.
You taught me how silence speaks,
and how forgiveness isn't something we give the dead —
but the parts of ourselves that buried them.
Amira took his hand and held it tight.
They sat there as the tide crept in slowly, gently — no longer a threat, but a presence. A reminder. A rhythm.
That evening, back at the lighthouse, Elias finally asked the question that had been resting on the tip of his tongue for weeks.
"What do you see when you look at me now?"
Amira turned to him.
"I see someone who has finally stopped running from the sea."