3b
521 Words
Dara didn’t expect her feet to carry her this way. Past the bakery with its warm, yeasty smell. Past the shopfront where Mrs. Fallon was setting out her seasonal bouquets, buckets of yellow roses that seemed to taunt her with their careless beauty. She wasn’t supposed to wander near the square this time of day—not when she knew there was a chance she might see him.
And yet here she was.
The town square had always been too small to hold secrets. That was the dangerous thing about living here: every mistake had a witness, and every heartbreak an audience. Dara tucked her hair behind her ear and kept her head low, but her chest pulsed with that wild, irrational hope she’d spent five years trying to bury.
She told herself she didn’t care. She was here for the market, or the fresh fruit, or the quick errand she had no real need for. But when she lifted her gaze, scanning the café across the street, her heart betrayed her.
Ethan.
He sat at one of the patio tables, sunlight breaking across his shoulders like he belonged to another world. His hair was a little shorter, his jaw more defined, but it was still him—the boy who used to kiss her forehead when she fell asleep on the library couch, the boy who once swore he’d follow her anywhere.
Now he looked older. Sharper. And impossibly far away.
Dara froze in the middle of the walkway, the world around her softening into blur. For a split second, he didn’t see her. He was staring down at a notebook, pen tapping against its spine, his expression pulled into something she couldn’t quite read.
But then he looked up.
And their eyes collided.
It wasn’t dramatic, no gasp of recognition or sweeping music like in the films. It was quieter, heavier. Like gravity shifting back into place after years of imbalance.
Her throat dried instantly. She could have walked away—should have walked away. But her legs betrayed her, every step dragging her closer to the past she thought she’d outrun.
He blinked, and in that blink she swore she saw it: the flicker of something unguarded. The boy she once knew, trapped under all that polish and time.
“Dara.”
Just her name. Low, steady, and threaded with something she couldn’t name.
Her breath hitched.
“Ethan.”
It was both everything and nothing, his name. A prayer. A wound.
The silence that followed stretched taut, buzzing between them with every unsaid word. Around them, the square pulsed with life—people passing, conversations rising and falling—but for Dara it all faded. There was only him.
She wanted to be angry. She wanted to demand why he left, why he never called, why he let silence rot away everything they had built. But instead, she stood there, skin prickling under his gaze, her heart battering against her ribs like it hadn’t learned anything at all.
He gestured to the empty chair across from him. “Sit?”
And God help her, she almost did.
- Writer
