Chapter 10
It had been a few days since I’d seen Dane.
I hadn’t texted him. I hadn’t called.
But I looked for him every day.
Sometimes in the quiet between deliveries, I’d catch myself glancing at the stairwell, expecting him to appear with that half-smile and a joke about modern hell.
He never did.
Until he appeared in the doorway late Thursday morning, hair damp from rain, mailbag slung low across his chest. His grin was crooked, his eyes shadowed by exhaustion but still soft.
“Hey, stranger,” he said, voice carrying that same lazy rhythm that had started to live rent-free in my head.
“Been uber busy down there. You’d think it was Christmas the way people are rush-posting everything.
Half the building’s acting like the world ends if they don’t get their invoices stamped today. ”
A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it light, unguarded. “Poor guy. Drowning in express deliveries and seasonal panic. Should I send a rescue team?”
He smirked, shoulders relaxing. “You volunteering?”
“Maybe,” I said, tilting my head. “I kinda missed your mail run. The routine of it.”
That earned me a quiet chuckle. “Yeah? Guess I missed the stairwell.”
His gaze flicked toward the glass wall behind me. “Cooler down there. Quieter. Feels like the only place that still remembers how to breathe.”
Something in his tone half jest, half confession, hung between us, steady and real.
“Guess we both needed that cool air,” I said softly.
He smiled, small and knowing. “Guess we did.”
And just like that, the space shifted lighter, but deeper. A breath between storms.
Still, there were traces when he left again. Small things that whispered of him.
A chocolate bar left on the bench outside my office door.
A can of peach tea on my desk, condensation still fresh.
A takeout coffee cup with my name written in looping, careful letters.
And once—
A single sprig of jasmine. My favourite vine.
I’d found it resting against my car door, delicate white blooms trembling in the morning breeze.
I didn’t need a note to know who it was from.
And even though I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard his voice since that day, it was enough.
Enough to remind me that someone out there saw me—not the version I pretended to be, but the quiet, hidden one.
The one who sat in stairwells, trying to remember how to breathe.
Lowering my eyes from him and back down to my phone I don’t want him to see the loneliness lingering in my eyes.
Dane
She’s different today.
It’s in the way she moves slower, smaller, like her body’s here but her mind’s a million miles away.
The woman who used to hum under her breath when she thought no one was listening now sits frozen at her desk, staring at her phone like it’s feeding her poison she can’t stop swallowing.
I know that look.
It’s the look of someone slipping quietly, beautifully into the undertow.
Her office door is cracked just enough for me to see her reflection in the glass wall.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, her hair pinned up like she’s trying to hold herself together with bobby pins and caffeine.
I shouldn’t care this much.
I shouldn’t watch her like this.
But hell, I’ve been doing it all my life.
Penn-Rose — the girl who used to sit at the back of class and write poems on her hands when she thought no one noticed.
The girl who smiled at the wrong boy and spent the next decade trying to survive it.
Blake was a star back then.
Golden. Untouchable.
But gold rusts when you look close enough.
And I looked close.
I watched the way he’d talk too loud, laugh too hard, always needing an audience.
I watched her fade, inch by inch, into his shadow.
And now, years later, here she is again, sitting in her glass box, breaking in silence while the world hums around her.
A notification pings from her phone.
She flinches.
Then goes still.
Her lips move a whisper I can’t hear, and she sets the phone face down like it might explode.
God, it kills me.
The way she hides her pain behind professionalism.
The way no one else in this office sees her drowning.
So, I decide to walk back in with a small envelope and drop it on her desk, even though we had spoken mere moments ago. “You, okay?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Her lips press together. “Just tired.”
Tired.
That word covers so much more than sleep.
I nod, pretending to believe it. “Then promise me you’ll at least eat something today.”
Her brows lift, faint surprise breaking through the haze.
“You keeping tabs on my lunch habits again?”
“Someone has to,” I murmur, and it’s the truth.
The corner of her mouth twitches not a smile, not yet, but the ghost of one.
And that’s enough to make my chest ache in the best and worst way.
I linger a moment longer than I should, watching the war play out in her eyes the fight between strength and surrender.
Then I tap the envelope on the desk and step back.
“Take care of yourself, Penn,” I say quietly. “You deserve a little peace.”
When I turn to go, I hear her exhale shakily, like she’d been holding her breath the whole time.
I want to go back.
I want to tell her I see her. All of her. The cracks and the light and everything in between.
But I don’t.
Instead, I walk away, the sound of my boots echoing down the corridor, carrying her silence with me.
Because loving Penn has always been like this.
Standing close enough to feel her heartbeat, but too far to touch it.
As I leave the office, the sky bleeds bruised shades of red and violet smeared across the horizon, the kind of beauty that hurts to look at.
It presses against my ribs, that colour heavy, aching, like grief trying to breathe.
I stop by the small corner shop on Main, the air thick with the scent of old newspapers and sugared dust.
A small bunch of flowers catches my eye nothing fancy, just soft white daisies and baby’s breath wrapped in brown paper. They’ll do. Gracie will love them.
At the counter, I add a trashy magazine I won’t read, a Whittaker’s peanut slab, a can of Fanta, and a bag of Bluebird salt and vinegar chips. Comfort in the cheapest, loudest form.
The walk home hums quiet around me cicadas buzzing in the trees, streetlights flickering awake one by one. The air smells of rain that never quite arrived.
When I reach the garden, the fairy lights are already glowing. They loop through the jasmine vines and cherry blossoms, soft gold against the dusk.
It feels like walking into a memory I can’t wake from.
I kneel by her headstone. My baby girl. My Gracie.
The flowers tremble in my hands as I set them down.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I whisper, voice catching on the wind. “I brought you daisies and baby’s breath.”
The words spill from me, quiet and cracked. I tell her about my day about the noise, the silence, the ache that follows me home.
I tell her how her daddy and I are struggling, how I don’t know how to fix what’s breaking between us.
How some days, I still reach out for her in the dark the instinct older than memory.
“I wish you were here,” I say, voice trembling. “Not like this. Not in the ground. I wish you were still breathing, still warm in my arms.”
The tears come without sound. Just the soft crunch of chips between sentences, the fizz of Fanta in my throat.
I break off a piece of chocolate, let it melt slow on my tongue, tasting sweetness against sorrow.
The fairy lights flicker. The night deepens.
“Goodnight, my girl,” I whisper finally, leaning forward to press my lips to the cold marble.
It steals my warmth, holds it for a moment, then gives nothing back.
I walk inside, shedding the day piece by piece, shoes by the door, clothes across the floor.
The shower runs hot, too hot, until my skin stings and the mirror fogs.
When I finally crawl into bed, the sheets are cool, the silence vast.
Sleep doesn’t come easy. It never does. But I close my eyes anyway, whispering her name into the dark until it carries me under.