Lena didn’t come to the library to read.
She came because she couldn’t breathe anywhere else.
The house felt too small. The town felt too loud. Her own skin felt like it was holding a heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. And ever since the café — ever since him — nothing inside her had been quiet.
So she pushed open the heavy oak doors of Blackthorn’s library, the oldest building in town, and stepped into the kind of silence that felt like it was listening.
It wasn’t peaceful.
It was expectant.
The air smelled like dust, leather, and stories that hadn’t been opened in decades. Sunlight cut through the stained-glass windows, splintering across the floor in fractured color — red, gold, green — like the floor itself remembered more than it ever said.
She walked in slowly, fingertips gr
