The Unknown Train

CHAPTER 7 — PLATFORM 0

When the train finally stopped, a stationmaster stood waiting beneath the old lamp, his coat dark with rain, his face unreadable in the shadow of his cap.

"You're not supposed to be here anymore," he said to Mira, not unkindly.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because the person you came to see has already gone."

"I know," she said.

"Then why are you still waiting?"

"Because I never said goodbye."

The stationmaster studied her for a long moment, and something in his expression softened, as if he'd heard some version of this answer many times before. Platform 0, Mira understood now, did not take people where they wanted to go. It took them where they still needed to be — and it would keep taking them there, night after night, for as long as they needed it to.

Aiden appeared one final time, stepping out from wherever he went between her visits, and for the first time, he looked less like a boy standing on a platform and more like something the rain had only briefly agreed to hold together.

"You shouldn't have come," he said.

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because this time, I'm not running away."

Mira looked at him — really looked, the way she hadn't let herself look at anything in years — and felt something in her chest finally begin to loosen.

"I was angry with you for years," she said. "Angry that you left. Angry that I couldn't even remember why I was angry."

"You had every right."

"I don't want to be angry anymore."

She took a breath, the kind of breath that comes before something irreversible.

"That night," she said. "What were you going to tell me?"

"You really don't remember?"

She shook her head.

"I was going to tell you that I loved you," Aiden said.

Mira's eyes filled before she could stop them. "I think I knew," she whispered. "Some part of me always knew."

"You don't have to come back tomorrow," he said.

"I know."

"You can finally go home."

"With you?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"Without me," Aiden said gently.

Mira's eyes filled with tears she didn't try to hide.

"Goodbye, Aiden."

"Goodbye, Mira."

The train pulled away from the platform without her, and this time she let it. She watched until its lights had shrunk to nothing, until the rain had swallowed the last of it, until Platform 0 itself began to dissolve back into the ordinary dark it had come from.

The train disappeared into the darkness, and for the first time, Mira did not wish it had taken her with it.