Sophie started waking earlier—sometimes before the sun, when the house was still shadowed in blue and the world hadn't quite turned its face to morning. It was the only time she felt completely still. No noise. No expectations. Just her, the quiet, and the soft echo of everything she was beginning to understand.
The lake shimmered outside her bedroom window. It didn't look different, but she saw it differently now. Like grief had sanded down the edges of everything sharp and left only what mattered.
Jake had begun to stop by without knocking. Not in a presumptuous way, but with the familiarity of someone who knew the rhythm of her days. Sometimes they worked in silence. Sometimes they spoke about nothing at all. And sometimes—rarely, and almost by accident—they spoke about the past.
"I used to write songs here," she said one afternoon, nodding toward the corner of the porch where her childhood guitar had rested for years.
Jake didn't say anything right away.
"I remember," he said at last. "You'd hum before you had the words."
Sophie smiled. "I still do."
There was a comfort in how little had changed and how much had. The town felt smaller now, not because it had shrunk, but because Sophie no longer needed it to be big.
She walked the old bookstore aisles like a returning ghost. The owner remembered her name.
Jake's mother invited her in for tea like no time had passed.
And in the spaces Sophie once ran from, she found pieces of herself left behind, patiently waiting.
---
That evening, they sat on the dock again. This time, Sophie brought her guitar.
The wood was weathered, strings slightly out of tune, but it still fit in her hands like it always had.
She didn't perform. She played quietly. No words. Just sound.
Jake closed his eyes and listened.
And in that moment, something settled between them. Not resolution. Not some cinematic reunion. But something quieter. Realer.
Forgiveness.
Not for each other.
For themselves.
"I thought I had to leave to become someone," Sophie said as they walked back to the house.
Jake glanced sideways. "And did you?"
She thought about the years, the stages, the heartbreaks and hotel rooms.
"Yes," she said. "But I think she was always here, too. I just didn't know how to find her."
Jake nodded, then gently reached out, brushing her hand with his.
It wasn't a declaration.
It was a beginning.
Later that night, Sophie stood in her mother's kitchen, tea steeping in a chipped blue cup, when she saw it: a note, tucked behind a magnet on the fridge. Faded. Folded twice.
She opened it carefully.
"For when you're ready to stop running."
That was all it said.
Her mother hadn't written much. But she always knew exactly enough.
Sophie pressed the note to her chest.
And for the first time in a long time, she felt like she had finally arrived.
Not to a place.