Chapter 10 – Selene's Surface Life and Memories
Selene's mornings began with ritual. She would wake before the alarm, as if her body had long ago trained itself to meet the day with discipline, not surprise. The first sound was always the same: the kettle whistling, a comfort she allowed herself. The smell of tea filled the kitchen while the apartment still carried the heavy silence of dawn.
By the time Maren stumbled in, hair wild and eyes half-shut, Selene already had toast on the table and her bag slung over her chair. She played the role without effort: the dependable older sister, the one who made sure the younger never went to school hungry, never forgot her homework, never left the house without a smile to hide behind.
"Did you finish your essay?" Selene asked, buttering a second slice of toast and pushing it across the table.
Maren groaned. "Yes. Don't start. I'm not like you."
Selene smiled faintly, but inside the words cut. Not like you. If only Maren knew what being like her really meant — the weight of silence, the private spaces where no one could follow. She wanted to tell her sister that she wasn't strong, not in the way Maren believed. But she never did.
After school drop-off and her own classes at the community college, Selene slipped into her second skin. In the lecture halls, she was quiet, focused, polite. She took meticulous notes, kept her head down, blended in. Professors liked her. Classmates barely remembered her.
This, too, was part of the costume.
What no one saw were the margins of her notebooks, filled not with formulas or lecture outlines but fragments of thoughts she couldn't say aloud. Half-sentences. Questions. Pieces of herself she couldn't let anyone discover.
Lately, those fragments circled around the letters. Around him.
She had reread his reply more times than she could admit. I will wait. If you choose to write, I will answer. Always. The words replayed in her mind during the quietest moments: while stirring soup for Maren's dinner, while brushing her teeth, while walking home through streets that felt too large for one person.
It startled her how much those words mattered. They weren't romantic, not in the way her friends might giggle about late at night. They weren't even promises of friendship. They were something rarer: an anchor. Someone she had never seen had tied a thread to her, and somehow that thread felt stronger than any bond she had with people who knew her face.
At night, when Maren was asleep and the apartment settled into stillness, Selene opened the drawer where she kept her photograph.
It was small, creased from years of handling. Maren as a toddler, cheeks round, clutching Selene's hand like it was the only thing tethering her to the world. Their parents weren't in the frame. They never were.
Selene traced her fingers over the image, the same way she had traced his words earlier that day. Both were talismans — one from the past she was still trying to carry, one from the present that felt almost too fragile to believe in.
The surface of her life — the smiles, the grades, the dependable sister act — was smooth and untouchable. But beneath it, new cracks were forming. Not the kind that broke things apart, but the kind that let light in.
And though she would never admit it out loud, the thought came to her as she tucked the photo back into its hiding place:
If a stranger could wait for her words… maybe she could begin to wait for herself, too.