That night, after the café, I could not sleep.
I lay in bed with the lamp still burning, the book on my nightstand untouched, my eyes fixed on the ceiling as if answers might be written in the cracks of plaster. My body was weary, but my mind—my heart—was wide awake. Every time I closed my eyes, Adrian's face appeared, not just as it was now, lined and weathered, but as it had once been—bright, full of reckless youth and impossible promises.
The flood of memories was merciless.
I remembered the first time we met. It was late spring, the air warm and thick with the scent of lilacs. I had gone to the river with my sketchbook, pretending to capture the sway of the trees but really just doodling nonsense in the margins. He appeared like something conjured, wading through the tall grass, his trousers rolled up to his calves, his shoes slung over his shoulder. His hair fell into his eyes, and when he saw me, he grinned, as though we were already old friends.
"You're in my spot," he said.
"Your spot?" I'd asked, indignant.
"Yes. That rock there—it belongs to me."
I rolled my eyes but shifted aside anyway. He dropped down onto the stone with a sigh, our shoulders nearly touching, and began skipping pebbles across the water. I tried not to watch him, tried to return to my sketching, but his presence was magnetic. By the time the sun sank low, I had drawn him instead of the trees.
That was how it began—two strangers sharing a rock by the river.
The memory slid into another, seamless as a reel of film unspooling. The night of the fair. Lanterns strung across the square, music drifting from the bandstand, laughter spilling like wine. I had worn a red dress, one that belonged more to boldness than to me, and he had stared at me as though I'd stepped out of a dream. He bought me a candied apple, sticky-sweet, and we danced clumsily among the crowd, my shoes scuffing the stones.
When the band played a slower song, he pulled me close, his breath warm against my ear. "I'm going to kiss you," he whispered.
I laughed nervously. "Here? In front of everyone?"
"Yes," he said, and then he did—right there, beneath the glow of lanterns, the crowd fading into nothing. My heart had raced so wildly I thought it might burst. That kiss was clumsy, a little too eager, but it was mine, the first kiss that truly mattered.
I touched my lips in the dark now, remembering it as though no years had passed.
Another memory followed, unstoppable—the summer evenings at the river, our secret world. We would bring blankets and books, lying side by side until the stars emerged. He read me poems in a voice low and earnest, his fingers tracing the constellations above. Once, he promised me forever there, his hand closing around mine with such certainty I believed the universe itself had heard him.
"Forever," I whispered back, and meant it.
But forever, I learned, is a fragile word.
The clock ticked on my nightstand, dragging me back into the present, and I turned onto my side, clutching the pillow as though it could anchor me. My heart hurt with the weight of all those memories—so sweet, so alive, and yet sharpened by the knowledge of what came after.
I thought of the letters he wrote me after he left, how they began full of life and longing, pages and pages of stories about the city he'd gone to, the professors who pushed him, the sketches he made of strangers on trains. He told me he loved me in every letter, always in different ways—sometimes as a whisper, sometimes as a shout.
But then, slowly, they grew fewer. A page instead of three. A line instead of a page. Until one day, they stopped altogether.
I had kept them, of course, folded neatly in a box beneath my bed for years, unable to throw away the pieces of him I still held. But I never read them again, not until long after I married, and even then only when loneliness pressed too heavily against me. Each word was a reminder of how something so bright could dim into silence.
And yet—here he was again. Sitting across from me in that café, watching me eat a lemon tart as though nothing had changed, as though we hadn't both lost decades to other lives.
What did it mean? Why now?
I turned onto my back again, restless, my eyes burning with the sting of unshed tears. I hated that he could still undo me with so little, that the memories of our youth had such power after all this time. I hated that part of me still ached for him, still longed for the boy on the river rock, the man on the train, the one who had kissed me under lantern light.
But most of all, I hated the fear creeping through me—that seeing him again might awaken something I had no strength to keep buried.
By dawn, I had given up on sleep entirely. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, staring out the window as the garden slowly lit with morning. The roses were blooming, the petals heavy with dew. The air smelled of earth and possibility.
My mind was still full of him.
I thought of the way his eyes had softened when he looked at me yesterday, not as though I was a stranger, but as though he had carried my face with him all these years. I thought of the way his voice cracked when he told me he'd never forgotten me. And I thought of how my own laughter had surprised me, bubbling up at the taste of lemon, as though some younger version of myself had been waiting all along to resurface.
The memories would not stop. They surged and swirled, relentless as the tide.
And though part of me wanted to resist, to push them back into the shadows where I had kept them for so long, another part of me whispered a dangerous truth: maybe it was time to let them come.
Maybe it was time to stop pretending I hadn't been shaped by the boy on the riverbank, the man who once promised me forever.
Because whether I wanted to or not, Adrian lived inside me still—in every echo, in every memory, in every kiss I had kept.
And now, he was no longer just a memory. He was here.