ASHES OF AUGUST

Chapter Two: Across Oceans

The ocean was a wall.

From Samoa to Vietnam, from Vietnam to Nairobi, their love was forced to live in cables and screens. Days dissolved into nights, nights into days, as Elena and Adrian built a fragile bridge of words and silence across the miles.

At first, it was letters.

Her handwriting arrived on thin blue aerogram paper, the kind that still smelled faintly of sea salt. Adrian, she wrote, the island is both heaven and prison. Every morning, the waves roar like a promise, but the nights… the nights are filled with secrets. I dream of you in every sound the wind carries.

He replied in careful ink, his words taut with longing. Elena, Vietnam is a furnace. The air tastes of smoke and iron, but I hold you like a talisman in every crowded street. I will come back for you. I swear it.

The letters became a ritual, folded into books, carried in pockets, kissed before sleep. But the world quickened; letters turned into calls.

A year later, 2021.

The screen flickered between them. Adrian sat shirtless in the dim heat of his Hanoi apartment, a fan spinning hopelessly in the background. Elena’s face bloomed on his laptop, half-lit by the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp.

“You froze again,” she teased, her voice catching with a delay.

“No, you froze,” he countered, grinning.

Her laugh filled the room, but the sound cut out mid-breath. For a second, silence pressed between them, heavy and unrelenting. Then her face returned, pixelated, as though the distance was trying to devour her.

“Elena,” he said softly, “tell me something real. Something you haven’t told anyone else.”

She hesitated. He could see her lips part, then close. Her gaze darted to the side, as if someone else was in the room. Finally, she said, “I still sleep with the scarf you left me. It smells like you.”

It was the kind of confession that broke him and healed him all at once.

But the strain deepened.

By 2022, their calls were no longer playful distractions; they became lifelines. Adrian would rush home from long, brutal days, ignoring food and colleagues, to sit before the screen. Elena would appear tired, her hair damp as though she’d been caught in a storm. Sometimes she vanished mid-sentence, blaming power cuts or the sea’s fickle weather.

Sometimes he didn’t believe her.

On one call, he asked, “What are you hiding from me?”

Her eyes darkened. “Not everything can be spoken across wires, Adrian.”

He leaned forward, desperate. “Then tell me in person. When?”

She pressed her fingers to the screen as if she could touch his face. “Soon,” she promised. “When the time is right.”

There were missed moments, too.

Birthdays spent alone. Christmases where he toasted her face on a laptop screen. The anniversaries where she wrote instead of called, sending words instead of voice. Every absence left a shadow that grew longer with time.

And yet, the bond never broke.

Adrian carried her letters like relics. He reread them during the silence of Hanoi’s blackouts, whispering her words aloud, convincing himself she was still with him. Elena, in turn, drew sketches of him from memory...his jawline, his crooked smile...filling notebooks with Adrian’s ghost so he would never fade.

In 2023, their reunion finally came.

At Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Adrian saw her step through arrivals, her suitcase rolling behind her like an afterthought. She was thinner, sharper, as though Samoa had carved something out of her. But when her eyes met his, the years collapsed.

“Elena,” he whispered, breathless.

She ran to him, her body colliding with his chest, her arms clinging so tight it was as if she feared he’d vanish if she let go. Around them, travelers bustled, announcements blared, but in that moment, the world was silent.

“I told you,” she murmured against his shoulder. “I’d come back.”

Still, the past clung to her.

Adrian noticed it in the way she scanned crowded rooms, her gaze always lingering a second too long on strangers. In the way her phone was always close, locked with codes she never explained. In the way her laughter came easily, but her silences came easier still.

Once, when he asked about Samoa, she stiffened. “Not tonight,” she said, brushing it away. “Let’s just live now.”

And so they did. Dinners under candlelight, long drives with windows down, whispered vows tangled in bedsheets. It was real, it was beautiful, it was theirs.

But beneath the romance, something else stirred.

Elena still had secrets, and the ocean hadn’t carried them away. It had only hidden them, waiting for the day they would return and shatter everything.

End of Chapter Two.