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Chapter Seven

Author: Tina Savage
last update Last Updated: 2026-01-29 02:01:37

Chapter 7: The Weight of Years

The second child arrived on a humid morning in late July, two years after Mara’s first birthday. The labor was shorter than the first but no less fierce. Veronica labored at home for most of it, surrounded by the familiar walls of the Willow Street townhouse, the midwife moving quietly between rooms while Ethan held her hand and whispered encouragement against her temple. When the contractions sharpened into something unstoppable, they transferred to the birthing
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  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 38

    Chapter 38: The Shadow That Learned to WaitThe autumn that followed the silver names on the water arrived without warning. One morning the air carried the first true bite of cold, the kind that slips under collars and reminds the body it is no longer twenty. Veronica woke to find frost rimming the terrace railing like delicate lace. She stood at the bedroom window watching her breath fog the glass, then fade, then return. Ethan still slept behind her, turned on his side, one arm thrown across the space she had left. His breathing remained steady, the rhythm she had matched for so many decades it felt like her own pulse.She dressed quietly. Wool socks. Thick cardigan. The green notebook from the nightstand. She carried it downstairs without opening it, set it on the kitchen table beside the kettle. While water heated she stepped outside.The frost had painted the garden in pale silver. Lavender heads bowed under their own weight. Rose hips glowed dull red against the gray. The cliff

  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 37

    Chapter 37: The Names the Sea KeepsThe summer that followed was the kind people remember in fragments years later: heat that pressed against the skin like a second body, cicadas that sang until the air itself vibrated, nights so clear the Milky Way looked spilled across black velvet. Veronica and Ethan lived those days with deliberate slowness, as though each one might be audited by time itself. They rose with the sun, brewed coffee on the terrace while dew still clung to the lavender, walked the cliff path before the heat thickened, returned to shade and open windows and the slow turning of ceiling fans that stirred memories more than air.Veronica carried the green notebook almost constantly now. It rested on the kitchen counter while she chopped herbs, on the arm of the chair while Ethan read aloud from novels neither had finished the first time around, on her lap during the long afternoons when they napped in the hammock strung between two ancient pines. She wrote in short bursts

  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 36

    Chapter 36: The Tide That Carries NamesThe days after the forgiveness in the candlelit circle felt like the first true exhale the house had taken in years. Sunlight came through the windows cleaner somehow, less filtered by dust or memory. Veronica noticed it in small ways: the way the wooden floors caught the morning light and held it longer, the way the sea sounded closer even when the tide was out, the way Ethan's laughter arrived quicker and stayed longer. They moved through routines with a lightness neither had expected. Coffee brewed stronger because they lingered over the pot. Meals stretched because conversation flowed without the old undercurrent of waiting for something to interrupt.Yet the house was not finished speaking.It began on a Tuesday in late spring. The garden had exploded into color: lavender spiking purple against the stone wall, roses climbing the trellis in reckless red, herbs spilling over their beds in fragrant green waves. Veronica knelt among the thyme,

  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 35

    Chapter 35: The Whisper from the WallsThe snow melted within two days, leaving the terrace stones slick and dark with moisture that refused to dry completely. Veronica noticed it first in the way her slippers slid slightly when she stepped outside to retrieve the forgotten mugs from the morning before. She caught herself on the railing, heart giving a single hard thump that echoed in her ears longer than it should have. Ethan was already inside, humming something old and half forgotten while he sorted mail at the kitchen table. She did not mention the slip. Some things felt too small to voice, yet they lingered like salt on the tongue.That afternoon the fog rolled in from the sea, thick and gray, swallowing the horizon until the world ended ten feet beyond the cliff edge. Veronica stood at the living room window, palms flat against the cool glass, watching the white erase everything. The house felt closer around her, walls pressing in with the mist. She pressed her forehead to the p

  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 34: The House Remembers (Revised Unending)

    The House Remembers (Revised – Unending)The coffee had gone cold in their mugs by the time the sun climbed high enough to burn the last of the morning mist off the terrace stones. Veronica set hers down first. Ethan followed a moment later. Neither moved to carry the mugs inside yet. They simply sat, shoulders touching beneath the blanket, watching the horizon where sea met sky in a thin, trembling line of silver.She spoke without turning her head. “Do you ever wonder what we would have become if we had never come back here after the city?”Ethan exhaled through his nose, a small sound that was almost a laugh. “Every day for the first five years. Then every week. Then every month. Now… only sometimes. Usually when the wind sounds exactly like traffic used to sound through the apartment windows.”Veronica nodded. She remembered those early mornings in the city penthouse, lying awake beside him while the rest of the building slept, listening to horns and sirens and distant shouts, won

  • Age Bound Ecstasy    Chapter 33

    Chapter 33: The Sound That Should Not BeThe house on the cliff had learned to carry silence like a second skin. After the body was removed and the police tape peeled away, after the family returned to their scattered lives and the road dried under a pale winter sun, the quiet returned thicker than before. Not the peaceful quiet of two people who had outlived most shadows. The kind of quiet that waits. The kind that listens back.Veronica noticed it first on the seventh night after the family left. She woke at three seventeen exactly—always the same time lately—because the house made a sound it had never made in sixty years. Not a creak of settling timber. Not the wind testing a shutter. A single, deliberate footstep. Overhead. In the attic that had been nailed shut.She lay still. Eyes open in the dark. Ethan slept beside her, breath deep and even, the way he always did when exhaustion finally overtook him. She counted her own heartbeats. One. Two. Three. The footstep did not repeat.

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