CHAPTER 10 — THE PROMISE
1048 Words
We decided to continue seeing each other on a Thursday evening.
There was no ceremony.
No declaration beneath the stars. No promise made in a place important enough to become another memory.
We sat across from each other in a quiet café, sharing a slice of cake neither of us particularly liked.
“You’re sure?” Lena asked.
“No.”
She looked down.
“But I’m here,” I said.
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“It’s the only thing I can promise tonight.”
She studied me for a moment, then reached across the table and took my hand.
Her fingers were warmer than they had been the night before.
“I don’t want you to think I’m keeping you prisoner,” she said.
“You’re not.”
“I don’t want you to feel obligated to stay because of what I remember.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t understand how dangerous this is.”
“No,” I admitted. “But I understand that being afraid doesn’t make it less real.”
Her thumb moved slowly across my knuckles.
“I have spent so many years trying to prevent this.”
“Prevent what?”
“Us.”
The word sounded strange between us.
Us.
It was such a small word for something that had survived more than a century.
I smiled faintly.
“You’re doing a terrible job.”
For the first time that evening, she laughed.
The sound startled both of us.
I wanted to remember it.
Not as a supernatural echo. Not as something that had happened in another life.
Just her laugh, in a café, on an ordinary Thursday.
Afterward, we walked through the city.
Lena told me about the first song she had ever learned to play. I told her about the time I broke my wrist falling from a tree and lied to my mother about how it happened.
“You said you hated thunderstorms,” she reminded me.
“I do.”
“You also said you liked quiet mornings.”
“I do.”
“And old photographs.”
“That’s my profession.”
“You always confuse the things you love with the things you use to survive.”
I glanced at her.
“Is that another thing I said in a previous life?”
“No.” She looked ahead. “That one is new.”
We stopped beside the river. The water reflected the city lights in broken lines.
“What kind of life would you choose,” I asked, “if you could choose anything?”
She leaned against the railing.
“A small house near the sea.”
“You’ve said that.”
“Not to you.”
“Not in this life.”
She smiled, but the smile faded quickly.
“I would have a garden. I’d grow things badly. Tomatoes, perhaps. Herbs. I’d learn to cook. I’d own a piano, even if I never played it well.”
“And me?”
She turned toward me.
“You wouldn’t be there.”
The answer hurt.
She saw it immediately.
“Not because I wouldn’t want you,” she said. “Because I would want a life that didn’t end with losing you.”
I looked at the river.
“What if this life doesn’t end that way?”
“Then I’ll believe it when we reach it.”
“Before October 17?”
She went still.
I regretted bringing it up, but I needed to hear her answer.
“You promised to tell me everything,” I said.
“I remember.”
“Before October 17.”
“Yes.”
“Even if the truth makes me leave?”
Her eyes moved to mine.
“Especially then.”
I nodded.
“And I promise something too.”
“What?”
“I won’t let fear decide my life.”
Lena’s expression changed.
“Be careful with promises.”
“Why?”
“Because you always keep them.”
The words were almost a whisper.
I stepped closer and touched her cheek.
“Then I’ll keep this one.”
She closed her eyes beneath my hand.
For the next few weeks, we tried to live as if we were ordinary people.
We went to bookstores and argued about endings.
We cooked together, though Lena nearly burned the kitchen while trying to make soup.
She played the piano in her apartment, and I listened from the floor with my back against the couch.
Sometimes she kissed me without hesitation.
Sometimes she woke from a dream and moved away before I could touch her.
Whenever I mentioned the future, she became distant.
“What would you like to do next summer?” I asked one afternoon.
“Summer is far away.”
“Not that far.”
She folded a shirt she had already folded twice.
“What about next week?”
“We could go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere neither of us has been.”
She stared at me.
“I’ve been almost everywhere.”
“Then somewhere you haven’t been with me.”
She smiled sadly.
“That is more dangerous than you think.”
I wanted to ask what she saw when she looked at me.
A lover?
A memory?
A man already disappearing?
But I was afraid of the answer.
One evening, Lena invited me to her apartment while she went out to buy groceries. I stayed behind, searching for a book she had mentioned.
Her apartment was filled with old objects: a brass clock, faded paintings, a cracked music box, photographs arranged in careful rows.
I had seen some of them before.
But not the wooden box beneath her desk.
It was unlocked.
Inside were letters tied with a black ribbon.
Most were yellowed with age. Some were written in languages I could not recognize. Others carried dates from years before I was born.
I lifted the first envelope.
Then I saw the name.
My name.
Noah.
The handwriting was mine.
I turned the envelope over.
The date was written beneath the seal.
October 3.
But the year was 1912.
I stared at it, unable to breathe.
The letter was addressed to me.
And I had written it.
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