The next night, he returned.
He told himself it was coincidence. That he happened to walk the same path again because the air was cooler there, because the trees shivered with a sound like distant bells. But when his eyes found her—sitting exactly where she had been, beneath the skeletal shade of the old oak—he knew there was no accident in it.
She looked the same as before, as if not a single second had passed since their first meeting. Her hair caught in the night breeze, shimmering with threads of silver. Her eyes lifted when she felt his approach, and the smallest smile played on her lips—quiet, reserved, yet warm enough to unravel something inside him.
"You came back," she said.
He almost laughed. "And you sound surprised."
Her expression tilted with amusement, though her voice remained soft, almost weightless. "Most people don't return to strangers they meet in the dark."
"Then maybe I'm not most people," he said before he could stop himself.
The silence that followed was not empty—it was alive, filled with the hum of crickets, the whisper of leaves overhead, the weight of her gaze on him. He lowered himself onto the bench beside her. The wood was cool, but her nearness carried a delicate warmth, the kind one noticed only when it began to fade.
"Do you always sit here?" he asked.
Her eyes drifted upward, toward the silver disc suspended in the black. The moonlight seemed to cling to her skin as if reluctant to let go. "Only when it shines."
He frowned at the echo of her words from the night before. "What happens when it doesn't?"
"I'm not here," she whispered, as if admitting something forbidden.
There it was again—that impossible answer, spoken with the ease of truth. He should have laughed, should have teased her for being dramatic, but the tone in her voice stilled him. She wasn't joking.
Instead, he studied her in silence. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, fingers twined too tightly, betraying the steadiness of her face. She looked delicate, but not fragile in the way of sickness—fragile in the way of a dream you're afraid to touch, lest it vanish.
Finally, she turned to him. And the sadness he'd only glimpsed last night bloomed fully in her gaze.
"Do you believe," she asked, her voice scarcely more than a sigh, "that some people are meant only for the night?"
The question lodged in his chest. He searched for an answer but found only the pounding of his own heart.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But if that's true… then I think the night is worth staying awake for."
For a moment, her eyes widened, startled, before softening with something fragile and luminous—gratitude, maybe, or sorrow too heavy for words.
The wind stirred again. She closed her eyes, tilting her face toward the moon as though it were the only warmth she knew. And in that stillness, with silver light pouring over her and shadows draping the ground like velvet, he thought she looked less like a girl and more like a prayer.
But prayers weren't meant to be answered. And somehow, instinct whispered that if he reached for her, she would vanish.
So he didn't. He only sat beside her in silence, watching the moon carve its path across the heavens, terrified of the moment when its light would fade—and take her with it.