Chapter Text
She didn’t expect him to look like that.
So unchanged. So out of place in the way he now moved through memories that didn’t belong to him anymore.
He was back in the same house she used to watch from her bedroom window. Back for the holidays, like nothing had ever happened in between.
Except everything had.
She remembered the way she used to look at him back then, when childhood still made everything feel simple. When he was just a boy she followed with her eyes, convinced that nothing could break that quiet certainty.
Now that feeling was gone.
What had once been something close to love had twisted into something she couldn’t name properly anymore. Not clean enough to call love. Not distant enough to call hatred. Something stuck in between, tangled tightly around the memory of him.
She stood by the window with a cigarette between her fingers, watching the smoke dissolve into the cold air outside.
It reminded her of him in a way she didn’t like admitting. The way he used to disappear from her life without fully leaving it.
And now he was back.
Walking into everything she had spent years trying to turn into something else.