After that night at the docks, nothing between Adrian and me was ever the same.
We never spoke about what happened. Not once. Not when we lay side by side in the dark, pretending to sleep. Not when we walked down empty streets, our hands brushing but never fully holding anymore.
Not when his eyes would go distant, like he was already somewhere far away.
The silence became our prison.
Every time I opened my mouth to ask if the man survived, Adrian would tense, his jaw locking tight. So I stopped asking. I stopped breathing too loudly. I stopped being me. Because the girl I had been—the one who laughed too easily, who dreamed too much—was gone the moment that man hit the ground.
Still, I stayed. Because love makes fools of us. I told myself I couldn't abandon Adrian, not when he was breaking in front of me. Not when he needed someone to keep him from drowning.
But the truth? He was already sinking, and he was pulling me under with him.
It happened one evening, weeks after the accident. I remember it vividly—the smell of rain clinging to the air, the railway tracks humming in the distance. That was our place, the old bench behind the abandoned station. The place he used to talk about like it was a doorway to freedom.
He wasn't there.
I thought maybe he was late, maybe caught in traffic, maybe in one of his moods again. So I waited. I watched the sky darken, the orange fading into gray. I counted the trains that rattled past, each one reminding me of the life we had promised but never taken.
When I finally noticed the folded piece of paper wedged under the splintered wood of the bench, my chest went cold.
I pulled it free with trembling hands. My name wasn't on it. No greeting. Just his handwriting—rushed, uneven, desperate.
"I have to disappear. Don't look for me. Don't wait for me. Forget me, Elena. It's the only way you'll be safe."
That was it.
No goodbye kiss. No explanation. No promise to return. Just those words, like a knife through the ribs.
I sank onto the bench, my dress soaking up the damp wood, the letter crumpled in my fist. I read it again and again until the ink blurred with my tears. Safe from what? Safe from him? From the accident? From the ghosts that haunted him every night?
The questions ate me alive.
For weeks, I searched. I went to every place we had ever been, asked people who might have seen him, even risked returning to the docks where it had all begun. Nothing. Adrian was gone like smoke in the wind.
I hated him for it. I hated the cowardice, the selfishness of running away and leaving me to carry the weight alone. But even in my anger, I couldn't stop loving him. That was the cruelest part.
And so, eventually, I stopped looking. I stopped hoping. I built walls around my heart and buried him behind them.
Years passed. Life moved on. I convinced myself he was just a memory—sharp, painful, but locked away.
But standing in that church today, hearing him call my name, watching him step out of my past like he'd never left…
I realized something terrifying.
Adrian hadn't vanished to forget me. He hadn't left me behind at all.
He had left so that one day, he could come back.