CHAPTER SIX: PARALLEL HEARTS
615 Words
CHAPTER SIX: PARALLEL HEARTS
The sky was a soft gray haze when Clara returned to the lake.
It wasn’t planned—at least not out loud—but her feet had led her there anyway. The air smelled like pine needles and damp earth, and a distant loon called across the water like it remembered something it couldn’t say.
Elias was already on the dock.
He sat on the edge, barefoot, sketchbook resting on one knee. His head was tilted toward the horizon, but he didn’t seem to be watching anything in particular.
Clara hesitated before stepping down onto the wood.
What am I doing here again? This isn’t part of the plan. But nothing about this feels like a mistake.
He looked over his shoulder and gave a soft, unreadable smile. “Thought you might come.”
“I wasn’t sure I would.”
“But you did.”
She took a seat beside him, close but not touching. The lake lapped quietly beneath their feet.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Then Clara said, “You don’t ask me many questions.”
Elias didn’t look at her. “I figure people share what they’re ready to.”
She glanced at him, surprised. “And if they never are?”
He shrugged. “Then maybe they just needed someone to sit beside them anyway.”
God. I forgot what that felt like. To be with someone who doesn’t need me to perform grief or hide it. Just be.
She looked out over the water. “Do you ever wish you’d done something differently?”
“All the time,” Elias said. “But then I look at what came after, and I wonder if I’d still be me if I hadn’t screwed it up first.”
Clara smiled faintly. “That sounds like something Margaret would’ve written in her journal and never admitted aloud.”
He chuckled, low and genuine. “She was always quieter than people realized. But loud inside.”
Clara turned her head toward him. “You were part of that noise.”
“I know,” he said.
And maybe I’m part of it now too. Maybe we’re still writing the parts she never finished.
She leaned back on her hands, face tilted toward the dull light. “I always thought I wanted someone who burned bright. Who pushed me. Made me bigger.”
“And now?”
“I think maybe I want someone who lets me shrink sometimes. Someone who doesn’t flinch when I disappear for a bit.”
Elias was quiet for a long time. Then: “I don’t need all of you all the time. Just the part that stays.”
The words hit her in the ribs.
The part that stays. What does that even mean anymore? I've never stayed for anything. Never trusted something enough to plant roots.
Her throat tightened. “That’s a lot to ask.”
“No,” he said. “It’s just enough.”
She looked down at her fingers, fidgeting in her lap.
“I’m not whole,” she said. “I’m still figuring this out. Us. Her. Me.”
“You don’t have to be whole,” Elias replied. “You just have to be honest.”
And for once, maybe I can be.
She nodded slowly.
They stayed on the dock until the wind picked up and the light began to fade, their feet just barely touching, the air thick with the kind of silence that only happens when nothing needs to be said.
And for the first time in years, Clara didn’t feel like she needed to leave to breathe.
She was already breathing.
Here.
- Writer
