Chapter Twenty
Miles Apart
Two years later
Elara stood at the edge of the Pacific, watching the sunset paint the water in shades of orange and gold.
San Diego had become home. The research was going well—better than well, actually. Her paper on seagrass restoration had been published in a major journal, cited by dozens of other researchers, and led to a permanent position at the institute. She had colleagues who respected her, students who admired her, a life that was entirely her own.
She also had a drawer beside her bed where a folded letter lived, its edges softened by the number of times she had read it.
She thought about the letter often. Not with the ache she had carried in the first year, the sharp-edged grief that had made it hard to breathe. That had faded, slowly, the way a
