CHAPTER 16 — Delicate Distance

Mornings came softer now.

Not easier just quieter.

Amara had stopped checking her phone first thing. Stopped expecting messages that never came, calls that never would. Instead, she filled her mornings with sound  the low hum of the kettle, the distant traffic, the scratch of her pen against paper. It was how she tricked herself into believing silence was a choice, not an absence.

It had been months since she left him.

And yet, his shadow still lingered  not as pain anymore, but as something… unfinished.

She’d moved to a smaller apartment overlooking the park. The view wasn’t spectacular, but it was hers. The windows leaked a little when it rained, and the walls carried echoes from neighbors arguing through thin plaster. But there was life here  unpolished, uncurated, real.

Her therapist once said healing isn’t about forgetting, it’s about making peace with what still hurts.

Some days she almost believed that.

She poured herself a cup of coffee, taking it out to the small balcony. From there, she could see a couple walking their dog, laughing at something she couldn’t hear. For a brief second, she wondered if they’d ever hurt each other  if all love eventually came with bruises invisible to the eye.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

Her pulse jumped before she could stop it. But it wasn’t him  it was her publisher, reminding her about a manuscript deadline she’d been avoiding. She’d been writing again. Not romance this time, not even fiction  just essays, fragments of thought, letters to versions of herself that didn’t know better.

Still, some nights, she caught herself writing as if he might read it one day.

There were traces of him in everything she did in the music she played when it rained, in the way she still avoided certain cafés, in the books she couldn’t bring herself to open because they smelled too much like that chapter of her life.

Healing wasn’t linear. It was looping  like grief that forgot its way home.

That afternoon, she met Ava for lunch. Ava, her closest friend and the only person who hadn’t told her to “move on” like it was as simple as packing a suitcase.

“You look better,” Ava said, stirring her drink. “Less like a ghost.”

Amara smiled faintly. “Maybe I’ve just learned to haunt myself better.”

They laughed, and it felt good  real, unforced.

But later, as they walked down the street, Ava paused. “Are you okay with this place?”

It was the old bookstore. The one Amara used to visit with him on Sundays. She’d forgotten it was near.

Her chest tightened, but she nodded. “I’m fine.”

Inside, everything looked the same. The bell still chimed softly. The air still smelled like paper and nostalgia. And there, tucked near the back, was the poetry section  the one they used to linger in, pretending to browse while stealing glances at each other over the shelves.

She ran her hand along the spines, fingers pausing on a familiar name  Rilke.

He’d tried to quote Rilke once and stumbled over every word, and she’d laughed until her stomach hurt. She could still hear it  that laugh echoing softly through memory.

“Still your favorite?” Ava asked.

“Still,” she said quietly.

They paid and left, stepping into the crisp wind. The street was crowded now  faces and voices blending into motion. And that’s when she saw it.

Across the street.

A man, standing beside a parked car.

For half a heartbeat, she thought it was him.

The same height, the same tilt of his head when he looked down at his phone. Her breath caught the world narrowing to that single image.

But then he turned, and it wasn’t.

The relief should’ve come instantly, but it didn’t. It left her hollow instead  the kind of emptiness that follows almost-recognition.

Back home that night, she sat at her desk, staring at the blank page in front of her. The cursor blinked like a dare.

She began to write:

“I keep thinking healing will feel like freedom,

but some days it just feels like learning how to live without translation.

You don’t unlove someone;

you just learn to stop speaking their language.”

She paused, breathing through the weight of her own words.

Then, she added another line  softer, truer:

“Some part of me still waits  not for you, but for the version of myself I lost when I loved you.”

By the time she finished, it was past midnight. Rain had started again  gentle, steady, like a familiar song playing from far away.

She went to close the window, and that’s when she noticed it.

An envelope slipped halfway under her door.

Her pulse spiked. She hesitated, heart thudding.

She picked it up plain white, her name written in handwriting she’d know anywhere.

Liam.

Her hands trembled slightly as she tore it open.

“You once told me leaving was your only way of loving yourself again.

I think I understand that now.

I don’t expect you to forgive me, or to come back.

I just hope you know I finally learned what you meant.”

No signature. Just like before.

She stood there, letter in hand, rain whispering against the glass.

For a long moment, she didn’t move. Didn’t cry. Didn’t smile.

Then, almost without realizing, she whispered, “Good.”

And she meant it.

Because for the first time, his words didn’t feel like a pull.

They felt like closure.

Not the loud, cinematic kind  but the quiet kind that lets you breathe again.

She folded the letter neatly and tucked it between the pages of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

Then she turned off the light and went to bed 

heart not whole yet, but finally at peace with its cracks.

Outside, the city hummed. Somewhere across town, maybe under the same rain, another pair of hands was shaking from writing what he should’ve said years ago.

But neither of them reached for their phones.

They just let the night be what it was 

a delicate distance between what was, and what might still be.