365days between us

Chapter 3

The city of Rosemount never slept easy in autumn. Leaves fell like tired confessions onto cobblestone streets, and the wind carried the scent of rain that hadn’t fallen yet. It was in this city, in a small bookshop tucked between a bakery and a shuttered cinema, that Adaeze first saw him.

He wasn’t looking for love. He was looking for a book on architecture, something about bridges and the mathematics of things that held weight without breaking. But he found her instead, perched on a stool, sleeves rolled to her elbows, arguing passionately with the shop owner about whether Wuthering Heights was a love story or a warning.

“It’s a warning,” she insisted, “dressed up in a love story’s clothes.”

He’d laughed before he could stop himself, and she’d turned, startled, caught between annoyance and curiosity.

“You disagree?” she asked.

“I think,” he said slowly, stepping closer, “some warnings are worth ignoring.”

It should have ended there; a stranger’s flirtation, forgotten by nightfall. But he came back the next day and the next. Always with a different excuse, “a book he forgot,” or “a question about a poem,” until the shop owner started leaving them alone on purpose, smiling to herself behind the register.

Their love, when it came, came slow and certain, like dawn breaking over a city that had forgotten what light felt like. He would meet her after closing, and they’d walk until their feet ached and their voices grew hoarse from talking about everything and nothing. He knew, before she said it, that she was the kind of woman who loved fiercely but rarely admitted it. Who built walls not because she didn’t feel, but because she felt too much and feared what it would cost her.

And she knew, before he said it, that he was the kind of man who….”

“ELSA!”

The pen clattered from her fingers as her bedroom door burst open with all the grace of a hurricane wearing slippers. Bella stood in the doorway, hand on her hip, grinning like she’d caught a thief red-handed.

“Ah ah, again?” Bella said, striding in and snatching the notebook before Elsa could react. “Another one of your Korean movie stories, abi?”

“Give it back!” Elsa lunged, but Tessa had already appeared behind Bella, peering over her shoulder, eyes scanning the page hungrily.

“Wuthering Heights as a warning,” Tessa read aloud, then burst out laughing. “This your brain. Why can’t you just write about us instead of some Adaeze and some man with no name?”

“Because,” Elsa said, finally wrestling the notebook free and hugging it to her chest like a shield, “you two would never survive being in one of my stories. You’d start a whole war over who gets more dialogue.”

“True,” Bella admitted without shame. “But still. One day, write about us. Make me the one who gets the fine, rich man. Tessa can be the funny one.”

“I don’t want to be the funny one!” Tessa protested.

“You’re already the funny one in real life, my dear, I’m just documenting.”

Elsa laughed despite herself, shaking her head as she shoved both of them playfully toward the door. Her mind still racing through the name on her phone last night, “UNKNOWN”. She decided to ignore the message.

“Out!, both of you. To the Kitchen now!. If I’m not writing, then somebody’s cooking, and that somebody is us.”

The kitchen came alive with the hiss of oil hitting a hot pot, the sharp, smoky perfume of rice frying just at the edge of burning, the way their mother always insisted it should, just enough smoke to remember the fire. Bella stirred with the wooden spoon like she was conducting an orchestra, while Tessa chopped tomatoes with more enthusiasm than precision.

“You know,” Bella said, over the sizzle, “Mummy said when she was our age, she already knew how to cook seven different soups. Seven! I can barely manage two without calling her on the phone.”

“That’s because Mummy didn’t have YouTube,” Tessa said, tossing diced onions into the pot with a flourish. “She had to actually learn from her own mother’s suffering.”

“Suffering,” Elsa repeated, smirking. “Is that what we’re calling this cooking lesson?”

“Painful, character-building suffering,” Bella confirmed solemnly, and all three of them dissolved into laughter, the kind that came easy and full-bodied, the kind only sisters who’d shared a womb of memories could produce.

The smoke curled up toward the ceiling, and for a while, there was only the comfortable noise of spoons against metal, of laughter fading into hums, of three girls existing in the simple, unbothered rhythm of family.

Then Tessa, without looking up from the pot, asked the question so casually it almost slipped past unnoticed.

“So Elsa. All this your love story writing… who’s your own boyfriend?”

The wooden spoon in Bella’s hand stopped stirring.

The kitchen, suddenly, felt too quiet for a room filled with smoke and rice and fire.

Elsa opened her mouth and found, for the first time all evening, that she had absolutely no idea what to say.