Chapter 29 #3
And tucked between all those small evidences of grace and talent was one that had hit him hardest: a picture he’d snapped of his mother and Julia’s.
The two of them facing each other, hair wind-tangled from the lake, half-turned toward each other with some private joke.
Not posed. Not aware of him. Just laughing—full-bodied, carefree, the way grown women rarely allow themselves to be when the world is watching.
And now, years later, after the hard conversation with his mother at the kitchen table—after her quiet confession that losing Julia’s mom had been her own private grief—this photograph felt unbearably significant.
She’d told him, voice shaking slightly, that it had felt like a betrayal when Julia’s mother disappeared. Not because she’d left them, but because she hadn’t trusted anyone enough to stay.
“She was my person,” his mother had whispered. “My true friend. And she slipped away without a word. I didn’t know if I should be angry or worried or both.”
Julia’s grandfather had said something similar in his own rough-edged way—how the disappearance felt like a wound the family didn’t know how to bandage.
But hearing it from his mother, who had waited at that same lake for a friend who’d never walked back down the path…
that had been different. More grief-stricken in a sense, that loss of girlhood, of a shared bond. More relentless in its void.
Looking at the photographs now, Ethan finally saw what he hadn’t understood as a boy: the depth of that friendship, the depth of that loss, and the invisible threads tying all their stories together.
Even back then, long before he knew what it meant to really see someone, Ethan had been trying to make sense of the world by capturing the parts of it that felt like home.
And the one part that felt the most like home had to have been Julia.
Every picture of her spoke to a quiet kind of adoration he hadn’t yet learned to name.
There was the one where she was in profile, tucking her hair behind her ear, sunlight catching on the soft sweep of her cheek, the gesture so familiar, it felt like muscle memory.
Another, taken from the dock, with her looking up at him with that lopsided smirk she used to deploy whenever she caught him being too serious.
Summer freckles on full display, chin tilted, eyes bright with something unguarded and mischievous.
There was a softer one, too—Julia mid-laugh, head thrown back, her braid slipping over her shoulder, blurred in motion, as though the moment itself refused to stay still.
And another he’d taken without thinking: her wrapped in a faded beach towel, bare feet on weathered planks, watching the lake with a kind of longing he hadn’t understood then.
She must have been fifteen, maybe sixteen.
He could see the early shape of who she would become, and the early shape of what he was already losing, even as he stood right beside her.
He hadn’t been trying to capture beauty, not really. He’d been trying to hold on to her—the girl who’d made everything around her glow a little brighter simply by being in the frame.
Even now, flipping through images he’d once dismissed as “just for fun,” Ethan could finally see the truth staring back at him: Somewhere between childhood and all the years he’d spent trying to outrun himself, Julia had become the axis he’d revolved around. The constant.
The home.
And he loved her.
It was so clear. Not just love—she was the center of his gravity, the steady pull of a star he’d been circling for years.
He couldn’t leave her, not really. Because there was no world where he existed without her. He needed her like air, like water. He needed her like a living planet needs its sun.
All the pictures of her proved that. And there were more—he thought back to that day in the town, the pictures he’d taken of Katy and Noah as they’d walked around, but also—
He pulled out his phone with shaky hands and scrolled up to that date. There, just as he’d expected, were the pictures of her.
Of Gem.
He had done it again without realizing—that day in town, snapped seemingly careless shots of a woman in motion, living her life, but through the lens of a person who loved her. Capturing every smile, every soft gaze.
He made a decision then and there. He’d spent enough time hiding at his parents’ house, ignoring the realities of the world outside. He’d taken a leave not just from his job but also from his senses and from all the things that mattered—that made him who he was. And at the center of it all—
Was her.
He didn’t know if she would have him; she’d made her need for independence clear.
But he at least had to tell her—no, show her—what he now realized.
It would take a few more days and another explanation that his parents deserved to hear, but he would leave with the promise to return, sooner than last time, more often than ever before. But first—
He could no longer avoid the gravity that always had a way of pulling him back.
Back to where he belonged.