Chapter 11
11
ANNA
B y the time I got home, the sky had turned the color of overripe peaches—soft, golden, and tinged with the threat of rain.
I kicked off my shoes in the entryway and leaned against the door for a second, letting the stillness press in. The silence was a balm after the day I’d had, but it didn’t ease the tight coil in my chest.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Opal.
About the way she’d looked at me. Not like I was a stranger, but like she already knew what I wanted. Like she’d been expecting me.
I hadn’t even asked about Atlas. Not really. I hadn’t needed to. The way her eyes flickered, the way her fingers paused over the spine of an old book when I said his name. It told me enough.
She knew him. Or at least, she knew of him.
And now she knew me. I’d left her my address and phone number.
I stepped into the kitchen and flicked on the lights. The condo glowed in pale amber, the way it did just before sunset, when the last of the day poured through the tall windows and scattered gold across the dark hardwood floors.
I have to admit, the Philharmonic did well, putting me up here. It was a beautiful space. Quiet. Polished.
Yet I felt restless inside it.
I poured a glass of cold water and stood there at the counter, staring out the window at the city beyond. Charleston was still moving—people walking dogs, shadows slipping past gas lanterns, someone laughing on a nearby balcony. Life, humming just beyond the glass.
I hadn’t told Opal much.
I’d said his name. I’d told her I was trying to find him. That we’d met at Garrison Green. That he hadn’t given me a way to reach him.
I hadn’t said how he made me feel.
How the second his hands touched my waist, the world had narrowed to breath and body and a hunger I’d never known before. How I’d let him press me against stone and claim me like I was already his. How I had let myself be claimed.
I hadn’t said that I was scared.
Not of him.
Of me .
I set the glass down, untouched.
I moved to the sofa and tucked my legs beneath me, tugging a soft throw blanket over my lap. I should’ve opened my laptop. Gone back to the conservatory and practiced the harp. Made a list for tomorrow. Something. Anything.
Instead, I reached for my phone.
No missed calls. No new texts. Nothing but the last thread I’d pulled up from a Google search earlier. The one with a grainy, half-obscured photo of a man too large for the ballroom he stood in, his face turned just enough to hide.
Atlas Dane.
I stared at the screen until the edges of the photo blurred, knowing that the image wouldn’t stay up for long. Someone would pull it. Erase it. Like he’d never been there at all.
Then I whispered the question that had been clawing at the back of my mind all day.
“What if I’m already in over my head?”
There was no answer.
Only the echo of my own breath, and the dangerous certainty that I didn’t care.
I needed to talk to someone.
I had friends—especially in Boston. A handful of good ones, even. People I could text or call right now. People who would make time for me. But when it came to the real things—the big, confusing, aching things—there were only two people I trusted completely.
My parents.
They were my constant. My compass. The two people who knew every version of me—the prodigy, the perfectionist, the girl who once cried for three hours when she cracked a harp string before her first solo competition.
They’d seen it all. And loved me through it.
So I pulled up my favorites list and tapped the number labeled Mama .
She answered on the third ring, the sounds of something sizzling in the background.
“Anya, my love.” Her voice was warm and thick with the faintest trace of her accent—the one that only returned when she was tired or distracted. “I’m making dinner. You’re just in time to tell me if your father would be happy or horrified with what I’m doing to his leftover borscht.”
I smiled, my heart tugging in two directions—relief and guilt.
“He’s still at work?”
“Of course. MIT doesn’t believe in hours, only in ‘the pursuit of knowledge.’” She paused. “You sound off. Are you all right?”
I sank deeper into the sofa, tucking the blanket higher around my waist. “I don’t know.”
A soft click told me she’d turned off the burner.
“What happened?”
Where did I even start?
I stared at the screen again—at the half-blurred photo of Atlas Dane—and exhaled shakily. “I think I made a mistake. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe it just feels like one because I don’t know what it is yet.”
My mother was silent on the other end. Not in a dismissive way. In the way she always was when she knew I needed space to find the words.
“I met someone,” I finally said.
Another beat. “Not Eugene?”
My laugh was sharp. “God, no. Eugene’s still a disaster. This is … someone else.”
“Tell me.”
So I did.
Not everything. Not the stone wall or the kiss that branded itself into my ribs. Not the way my legs had wrapped around his hips like they’d been waiting for that moment their entire life.
But I told her about Atlas. About meeting him at Garrison Green. About the way he’d looked at Eugene. The way he’d looked at me. About how we hadn’t exchanged a single personal detail and still, somehow, it felt like the most real connection I’d had in years. Maybe ever.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like I’m unraveling. But also like I’ve never been more awake.”
There was a pause.
Then: “And he left without giving you a way to find him?”
“He didn’t even say goodbye.”
My mother hummed softly, the kind of sound she made when her mind was moving faster than her mouth. “You’ve been through a lot this year, my darling. Sometimes our hearts … they cling to intensity when we’re still healing. Are you sure this isn’t that?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I’m not sure. But I need to see him again to find out.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then her voice softened.
“Your father would say to build a timeline. Make a list. Research. My advice? Follow your instinct. But protect your heart. It’s a rare thing, Anya. I don’t want to see it bruised again.”
I closed my eyes.
“I don’t think he’s like Eugene,” I whispered. “He didn’t manipulate me. He didn’t charm his way in. He just … showed up. And I let him in.”
Her breath caught faintly. “Then trust that. But promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“If this man turns out to be more storm than shelter … you walk away. Even if it hurts.”
I nodded, even though she couldn’t see it. “I promise.”
She sighed gently, a sound full of love. “Then I’ll save you a bowl of not-quite-borscht and tell your father to call you as soon as he has some time.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For always being the safe place.”
Her voice was thick now. “You’ll find your way, my girl. You always do.”
I ended the call and sat there for a long time, the glow of the room softening as the sun dipped below the horizon.
My mother’s voice still echoed in my ears—gentle, wise, unshakable. It always amazed me how much strength she carried in such a soft package. But I knew where it came from.
Russia had carved it into her.
She and my father had left behind everything they knew. They were barely older than I was now when they packed our lives into two battered suitcases and boarded a plane for a country where they had no guarantees.
But they never gave up. They never turned on each other.
There was a kind of ferocity in their love—born of hardship and hunger, of choosing one another every day even when the world offered nothing in return. It wasn’t the kind of romance you read in books. It wasn’t candlelit dinners and roses. It was her sewing buttons back onto his only good shirt. Him learning enough English to defend her at a hospital when she got sick. Them celebrating my mother’s first published short story in a language she didn’t grow up speaking.
It was real.
That’s what I kept circling back to.
My parents had built a life from the bones of survival. They didn’t play games with love. They didn’t waste it. That kind of love—their kind—was rare. Precious. It didn’t make room for betrayal, or cruelty, or someone like Eugene.
They had always wanted that kind of love for me.
Maybe I finally wanted it for myself.
Not the curated life. Not the perfect résumé husband or the ring with the right number of carats. Not a man who smiled in pictures and lied through his teeth behind closed doors.
I wanted the real thing. The love that held through hurricanes. The kind that survived exiles and empty bank accounts and the ache of wanting something bigger than what the world thought you deserved.
The kind my mother still stirred into her soup. The kind my father tucked into his lectures. The kind I’d grown up wrapped in, even when we didn’t have much.
I curled tighter beneath the blanket, heart aching in a way that was almost sweet.
Outside, the first drops of rain hit the windows. Inside, I was already starting to chase the storm.
I stood, then crossed to the bedroom and pulled open the drawer of my nightstand.
The journal was there, right where I’d left it—slim, leather-bound, worn around the edges. I traced the cover with my fingers before pulling it out and settling back onto the sofa, pen in hand.
There was something about writing by hand that always helped me find clarity. I loved the tactile feel of pen against paper, the way thoughts spilled slower, more deliberately, when they weren’t filtered through a screen. My mother had taught me the habit when I was little. Back in Russia, before she had much of anything, she'd had a journal and not much else. Writing, she said, was how she made sense of the world when everything else felt out of control.
She gave that gift to me without knowing how much I would need it.
I opened to a fresh page and began to write.
Not about Atlas. Not at first.
I wrote about me.
About the version of myself that had believed Eugene was what I needed. About the way I’d twisted myself into the shape of a perfect fiancée. The dinners with his board friends. The recitals where he introduced me like a prized acquisition. The ring I used to admire in photos but never felt quite right wearing.
He had checked every box. On paper, he was a perfect match. Educated. Connected. Ambitious. Handsome in that careful, cultivated way that looked good in engagement announcements.
But he hadn’t seen me.
Not really.
And I think that’s what I was finally coming to understand.
That I didn’t want the man who fit the mold. I didn’t want someone who looked right in photos or matched the résumé of my carefully orchestrated life.
I wanted someone who saw me when I wasn’t performing.
Someone who met me in the quiet corners of myself.
Someone who didn’t need me to be perfect.
The pen slowed. My breath did, too. Maybe what I needed … wasn’t what I thought I wanted.
I reached for the remote, flicked on the TV. Just noise, I told myself. A little distraction while I kept writing.
A talk show filled the screen—late-night replays, grainy and familiar. A set I half-recognized. I wasn’t really watching, not until the music started.
A piano chord. Soft. Haunting. Followed by a voice I knew instantly.
Coldplay. “Fix You.” That aching, too-honest anthem.
I froze.
The line about getting what you want but not what you need hit me like a gut punch. I’d lived it. God, I’d lived it. That was Eugene in one sentence.
My eyes burned.
Everything I had wanted—the comfort, the prestige, the structure, the plan—and none of what I actually needed.
He had made me feel small when I should’ve felt loved. Silent when I should’ve felt seen. He’d given me all the right answers, and none of the truth.
But I’d needed to go through it. I saw that now. I had to unravel what I thought love was in order to recognize the real thing when it came—rough and unexpected, in the arms of a man who didn’t ask for anything but the truth of me.
Atlas.
Maybe he wasn’t what I planned. Maybe he was what I needed. Maybe I was crazy and delusional to be thinking this way about him at all. Yet, my gut told me I was spot on.
I set the journal down slowly, the song still playing in the background, and wiped at the corner of my eye.
The rain picked up outside.
And then?—
The doorbell rang.
My breath caught in my throat.
I stood, frozen.
Heart pounding.
No one from the orchestra had this address. Not the other musicians. Not the board. Only two people had been given it when the Philharmonic arranged my housing—Eugene and the assistant who’d handled the paperwork. And God help me, if it was Eugene at the door after today’s stunt, I didn’t know what I’d do.
But my gut told me it wasn’t him.
I wasn’t worried.
In fact, something about it felt … inevitable. Like fate, knocking with calm insistence. Not to disrupt, but to deliver. Something rare. Something extraordinary. Something I’d never truly experienced before.
I crossed the room slowly, pulse skittering in my chest. I took a deep breath.
When I opened the door?—
It was him.
Atlas.
Dripping rain. Wise eyes. His hands tightened at his sides, like he was caught between apology and inevitability. As if fate had dragged him to my doorstep and he still hadn’t decided whether to surrender or resist. But he was here.
And my whole world went still.