Love's Healing Touch
Evening fell, beneath a sky afire with the starlight that had been spewed up across the horizon like tapers upon an altar dark as coal, Adrian and Elara lay side by side upon the cottage roof.
They lay outside under a blanket, heads tipped back, staring up into the stars in silence.
"I never thought the stars were near, that they just couldn't, somehow, have any effect," Adrian huffed. "Or maybe they remind me of the power of light in the dark."
Elara's eyes caught his, her own mirroring the lights in the black sky. "Like us."
He kissed her gently then—not as a man rebounding from loneliness or brokenness, but as a man after finding homecoming, redemption, and purpose.