Chapter 5

The storm rolled in without warning, the way autumn storms always seemed to on this particular stretch of coastline — one moment the sky was merely gray, and the next it had turned the deep, bruised purple of something about to break wide open. Zoe and Chris had been halfway to the orchard when the first fat drops hit, and by the time they'd sprinted for the covered porch of his family's house, they were both soaked through and laughing about it.

"Your mother's going to kill you," Zoe said, wringing out the hem of her sleeve. "Look at this floor. We've tracked in half the garden."

"She'll survive. She always does." Chris dropped onto the wooden bench that ran along the porch wall, tugging his damp notebook out from where he'd tucked it under his jacket to keep it dry — a reflex so automatic Zoe barely registered it as strange anymore.

The rain hammered the roof above them, steady and relentless, turning the world beyond the porch railing into a gray, shifting blur. It was the kind of sound that made everything feel smaller and closer — just the two of them, the bench, and the notebook Chris was absently smoothing flat against his knee.

"Read me something," Zoe said, nudging his ankle with her foot. "You've been scribbling in that thing all week. I've seen you. Very suspicious behavior."

Chris hesitated — a small pause, barely noticeable, but Zoe caught it. It was unusual for him; normally he handed his pages over with an eye-roll and a "fine, but don't laugh." This time his fingers lingered on the notebook's edge a beat too long before he finally flipped it open.

"It's not finished," he warned first.

"Nothing you write is ever finished. Read it anyway."

He cleared his throat, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter than his usual reading-out-loud voice — less performance, more like he was working something out in real time.

"'If I forget everything else,'" he read, "'let me remember the sound of rain, and a hand I used to hold.'"

He stopped there, glancing up, a little sheepish. "That's as far as I've gotten. It's supposed to be longer."

Zoe opened her mouth — already halfway to a teasing comment about poets and their dramatics, something about how he'd clearly been reading too many of the tragic romance novels his older cousin kept lending him — but nothing came out.

Instead, the words landed somewhere far beneath her ribs, hard and sudden, like a stone dropped into still water.

Rain. A hand I used to hold.

The porch tilted. For one disorienting, endless second, she wasn't sitting beside Chris at all — she was somewhere else, somewhere colder and grayer, where the rain hit glass instead of a wooden roof, and a hand was slipping out of her own no matter how tightly she gripped it, no matter how hard she begged it to stay.

"Zoe?"

She blinked. The porch swam back into focus — the bench, the rain, Chris's notebook now abandoned on his knee, his expression gone taut with concern.

"Sorry," she managed, forcing her voice into something light. "Got caught up in the poem, I guess. It's good, Chris. Really good."

He studied her for a long moment — longer than the comment warranted, his eyes doing that thing they sometimes did, like he was trying to read a page written in a language he almost understood.

"You sure you're alright? You went somewhere else just now."

"Just the storm," she said, wrapping her arms around herself. "Makes everything feel bigger than it is."

He didn't push — he never did, not when she deflected like this — but he shifted a little closer on the bench, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against hers despite both their damp sleeves, and neither of them commented on it. They sat like that, listening to the rain hammer the roof, until the storm finally wore itself thin and the light through the porch railing turned pale and washed-out.

Zoe told herself, all the way home, that the ache still sitting heavy in her chest was nothing. Just weather. Just a strange mood brought on by thunder and an unfinished poem.

She almost believed it.

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