There was a time when Emilia laughed easily.
Thomas used to live for that sound.
It was the kind of laugh that made you believe, for a fleeting second, that everything broken in the world could be fixed. It filled the small café where they met — the one near the pier that always smelled like burnt espresso and saltwater.
She was sitting by the window, sketching on a napkin, the rain tracing paths down the glass beside her. He had noticed her long before he'd had the courage to speak.
He remembered that day vividly — or at least, he thought he did.
"Do you always stare this much?" she'd asked without looking up.
Thomas froze mid-step, coffee in hand, cheeks flushing. "Uh— sorry. I just… you're drawing the pier."
She smirked, still sketching. "And you're judging my proportions?"
"Admiring them," he said before thinking.
That earned him a small laugh — quick, musical, and real. She finally looked up, and for a moment, the world outside the window blurred. Rain, noise, everything — gone. There was only her, and that calm certainty that he was supposed to know her.
"I'm Emilia," she said, as if he should already know.
"I'm Thomas."
"I know," she said again, smiling like it was a secret joke. "You looked like a Thomas."
He'd sat down across from her, heart still stumbling over itself.
They talked for hours that day. About art, about loss, about places they'd never been but pretended to remember. She told him she didn't believe in coincidences. That people were threads, and some threads were tied long before they met.
He had laughed, said it sounded like something out of a movie.
She'd smiled, tracing invisible shapes on the table. "Maybe life is just a story we keep rewriting until we get it right."
After that, she was everywhere.
Every song he listened to, every photograph he took, every corner of the apartment they would one day share. She painted sunlight into the gray parts of him and never asked what caused the shadows.
He never told her about the night his mother died.
Never told her about the years that went missing afterward — the therapy sessions, the sleepless nights, the half-remembered screams.
Because with Emilia, he didn't need to remember.
With her, forgetting felt like healing
.
But now, sitting in the silence of that same apartment, he wondered if those memories were ever real.
Maybe they weren't.
Maybe he had just dreamed them to fill the space she left behind.
The rain fell harder outside. Thomas pressed his forehead against the window, tracing the outline of her name on the fogged glass with his fingertip.
The letters trembled, fading quickly.
Just before they disappeared completely, a faint whisper brushed his ear — soft, familiar, almost tender.
You promised to never forget me.
He closed his eyes. "I haven't," he murmured. "I swear I haven't."
When he looked again, the letters on the window had rearranged themselves — almost imperceptibly — into a new word.
LIAR.