as a memory of Julian.
As a reminder that even costly mistakes can be remade into something that belongs only to you.
I stood where the ceremony would have been and imagined the chairs, the flowers, the aisle, the hundreds of eyes waiting to see whether I would become Mrs. Hale.
Then the vision faded.
There was only wind.
Only water.
Only my own name, whole and unborrowed.
My phone buzzed with a message from Mae.
You okay?
I looked out at the darkening sea and typed back.
I am now.
For the first time in months, I believed it.
When I turned to leave, the cottage windows glowed warm against the dunes. Behind me, the tide moved in and erased every footprint from the sand, not cruelly, not dramatically, but completely.
Some endings are not explosions.
Some endings are a door closing softly behind you, and the sudden, astonishing sound of your own life beginning again.
