Chapter Text
The city refuses to be quiet.
By the seventh morning, Harri knows the cadence of the Quarter the way a sailor learns the tide. Dawn comes with mops against thresholds and curses sloshed with water, the night’s glitter dragged back into the drains.
Mid day swells riotous—vendors hollering about charms that would sour in her hands, tourists already a little drunk on sugar and brass, a woman with a parrot that shrieks like a kettle whenever Teddy laughs.
Evening crackles. Jazz horns lean out of open doors, cicadas needle the edges of thought, and the river keeps its own metronome, big and slow, a heart that won’t be rushed.
Teddy adapts faster than she does. He has opinions about beignets (wonder), brass bands (ecstasy), and street magicians (suspicion that dissolves into delight when coins appear behind his ear).
His hair adverts his mood before his face can—saffron-gold when he’s pleased, lake-green when he is intent on mastering the wobble of his steps, bruised-plum in the split second before tears.
He has taken to the courtyard as though he built it, to the cracked basin of the dry fountain as a citadel.
The house Nik found—old bones, stubborn shutters, a lemon tree attempting bravery in a chipped pot—has become a map of small discoveries: the cupboard that sighs, the stair that whines, the slant of amber light that pools in the late afternoon like spilled honey across the floorboards.
Harri walks the perimeter the first day, the second, the third, fingers trailing the fence pickets as if memorising a word she’s never been taught aloud.
She listens to the house learn her—Teddy’s night-cry, her kettle’s whistle, the soft tread of a centuries-old vampire who does not bother to pretend he is not there.
Nik is a habit she did not mean to acquire. He does not hover, but he arrives.
She will turn from the wash-line and find him already at the gate, the bond singing like a struck string; she will be pinning Teddy’s blanket and hear his voice in her head saying, Love, that knot will never hold a storm; she will step into the street for oranges and meet his shadow before his smile.
Sometimes he is only a hum behind her eyes, sardonic and amused and infuriatingly steady. Sometimes he is exactly where she can see him, taking up space as if space likes being taken.
She hates how, when he goes, the city sounds too bright. She hates how, when he is near, the city gifts like it exhaled.
On the fourth morning she takes Teddy to the market by the river. Heat sits low, not yet mean.
The stalls smell of spice and frying oil, of damp rope and oranges with skin like lanterns. A woman presses a string of wooden beads into Teddy’s hand; he offers them back with the solemnity of a magistrate.
Another woman insists on tying a red ribbon to Harri’s wrist—protection, child, against eyes that pry. Harri thanks her and takes them off, because superstition is only the shape fear makes when it wants to feel useful.
Nik ghosts beside them without announcement, and still she knows him, the way one knows the pressure change before rain: the bond sharpening, her spine admitting relief it has no permission to feel.
“You collect ribbons now,” he says, examining the ribbon she tucks in Teddy’s hair with a mouth too close to a smile. “Shall I be jealous?”
“You’d be ridiculous,” she answers, but the word lands gentler than it could have. Teddy tips toward him in greeting, as if the wolf in the room is the safest thing to reach for.
He scoops the child with that same look she is learning—like he’s been handed a live current and must decide whether to brace or be carried. “Good morning, little usurper,” Nik tells Teddy. “Have you supplanted me yet?”
“Dadah,” Teddy informs him gravely, which is neither accurate nor fair.
Harri makes a noise between a protest and a laugh. “He does that with any word that starts hard,” she says. “Door is ‘dah.’ Dog is ‘dah.’ You are not exempt from his laziness.”
“Not laziness,” Nik replies, eyes gleaming. “Efficiency.” He glances over one shoulder, where a trio of men pretend not to stare. “We should walk.”
“Why?” she says, already knowing the answer.
“Because eyes,” he murmurs.
She bites her tongue on the retort. She is not naïve. Curiosity follows her as much as it follows him. New Orleans is a city built on watching—even the balconies lean to look.
They walk. He does something she is beginning to recognise as careful: not the obvious guard of a body interposed, not the arrogance of possession, but the geometry of presence—he arranges himself so she is simply… less visible.
A joke for the vendors, a barbed remark for a man whose interest is the wrong colour, a tilt of head that quiets a question before it becomes a problem.
It should rankle. It does. And also: she has been a spectacle on other people’s terms for long enough. The reprieve is not nothing.
He buys oranges with the kind of money that comes from time and ruin. He carries the paper sack in one hand, Teddy on one shoulder, and looks, for sixteen steps, like a man the world might have allowed to be ordinary.
The thought is dangerous. She lets it pass.
That night, after Teddy has fallen asleep in a nest of blankets without any respect for pillows, Harri finds Nik in the courtyard’s blue-dark. The lemon tree makes an argument with shadow. The fountain suggests a history of water without bothering to provide any.
“Tell me about them,” she says from the threshold.
He does not pretend to misunderstand, though his grin offers the option. “Them?”
“Your siblings.” She does not sit. “You talk around them like you’re walking a field that still has glass in it. I’d like to know where not to step.”
Something flickers in his gaze—amusement first, then a ripple of reflex anger, then the quieter thing that lives beneath both.
He sets his cigarette on the lip of the fountain and does not light it. A concession she did not ask for and will not name.
“Elijah,” he says, and his tone goes precise. “Is the brother people invent when they need a story about goodness surviving the winter. He is honour like a man can make a shelter out of it. He is also a liar, though he’ll call it diplomacy, and a hypocrite, though he prefers ’principle.’ He wears suits that cost more than this house and guilt that weighs more than it.”
“You love him,” she says.
“I love him,” he agrees, and the admission cuts clean. “When he keeps me, I resent it. When he leaves, I set cities on fire. That is brotherhood as we know it.”
She leans one shoulder to the doorjamb, the wood warm from holding daylight. “Rebekah?”
He exhales a laugh shaped like ache. “Rebekah, my heart, she is a dreamer that the world punished for dreaming. She wants what our hands spoil—human things, sun things, a front step with a child’s chalk scribbles and a neighbour who borrows sugar. She will carve your eyes out for threatening those impossibilities, and then she will bring you soup because you look thin.”
His mouth softens. “She is the best of us. She also thinks she’s the most wronged. Both can be true.”
“And Kol?” The name tastes like mischief even before it’s spoken.
“Kol is the sound glass makes when it breaks in another room and you cannot find the door quick enough,” Nik says, delighted and wary at once.
“He is brilliant, and he uses his brilliance as a knife. He is loyalty’s inverse—if he chooses you, he will burn the world because it’s fun to watch it bend around your silhouette. If he chooses himself, and he often does, he will sell you for a trick he hasn’t learned yet.”
He pauses, amused. “He will like you. He will pretend not to. He will be cruel because he thinks cruelty protects him. You may tell him it doesn’t; he will smile and be crueler.”
“You speak about them like weather,” Harri says. “Like they are systems that move through you rather than people you can refuse.”
“I have refused Rebekah more than once,” he says. “She forgave me eventually and has been exacting her revenge in petty domestic torments ever since.”
“Like what?”
“She once replaced every bottle in my cellar with vervain-spiked vinegar,” he replies, affronted and proud. “I did not notice until I had guests. Marcel wept. It was humiliating.”
“Marcel?” The name sits in his voice like a ring he doesn’t take off.
“My son,” he says without flinching. “Not by blood. By everything that matters more. He is this city made boy. He is hunger shaped into discipline. He is—” The bond shivers with pain that may be memory, may be hope. “He is not here for now.”
“And Elijah?”
Silence tightens. “Also not here,” he says at last, even, deliberate. “You will meet Rebekah first. Then Kol. Both will insist on being the first. Consider yourself warned.”
She nods like she has been told a tide time. “Thank you,” she says.
“For the warning?”
“For the truth,” she says, and does not add, you did not lie to me even when it would have been easier. He hears it anyway; the bond moves like water where words cannot cross.
Kol arrives before noon two days later, a storm that never learned subtlety. He does not knock.
He kicks the gate open with the heel of his boot and declares, to the lemon tree and anyone within five streets, “Brother, congratulations on your latest bad decision.”
Harri meets him in the courtyard with Teddy on her hip and a patience she has not yet used today.
Kol is all angles and sparkle, danger with dimples, a grin that tries to sell you both the knife and the bandage.
“This is her then,” he says, uninvited into her space, eyes bright with a cruelty so playful it would be easy to excuse it. “The little war-widow you’ve been courting between the ears. Smaller than I expected. Fiercer too.” His gaze drops to Teddy, whose hair flares indigo at the scrutiny. “And you’ve brought… a mascot.”
“A child,” Harri says, which is both correction and warning. “You’re Kol.”
“Deeply,” he says, bowing with a flourish that would be charming if it were not also threat. “And you are the girl who told my brother to be a family man in public.” He beams. “I have adored you from a distance for days.”
Nik is there then, the bond flaring with a heat Harri has learned means don’t. He places himself a fraction to her left, not blocking, not posturing, but drawing a line Kol can see.
“Play nicely,” Nik says without warmth.
Kol tuts. “You say that when you mean, ‘leave before I take your teeth.’ I’m not three, Niklaus.” He tilts his head at Harri. “He is very frightening when he glowers. You’ll get used to it. We did.”
“Is he…” Harri begins, watching Kol’s eyes track Teddy’s hair as if it were a flame, “always like this?”
“Worse,” Nik says.
“Better,” Kol says at the same time, delighted.
Teddy, who has been still with the intensity he reserves for new wolves, decides abruptly that Kol is interesting.
He leans toward him, small fingers splayed like a starfish.
Kol recoils half a step, then remembers he has an audience and allows an approach with a grimace so theatrical Harri nearly laughs.
“Why does it do that?” he asks, indicating the hair.
“It’s not an ‘it.’ He’s a boy,” Harri says, and Kol’s eyes flick to hers, assessing, pleased.
“Apologies, little boy,” Kol says gravely. “Your wig misbehaves.”
Teddy blows a raspberry that contains his entire spirit. Kol’s grin knives wider. He glances at Nik, mischief in every line. “You will hate how much you like him,” he says, sing-song, and vanishes before either of them can prove him wrong.
Nik exhales through his nose. “That went better than it could have,” he allows.
“He called my son an ‘it,’” Harri says.
“In Kol’s mouth, that was almost affection.”
She snorts, which is not, strictly speaking, dignified. “Your family is a hazard.”
“And yours?” he asks, soft without pity.
“Stubborn,” she says. “Wounded. Kind in inconvenient ways.”
“You will write to them,” he says—not a question, not permission. An acknowledgement of a fact. “You should.”
She studies him. “I intend to.”
“Good,” he says, and something unclenches that she didn’t realise she’d kept braced.
Rebekah comes at dusk like a verdict you want anyway. She does knock, three brisk raps like a gavel. Her dress is a thing of velvet and defiance; her mouth is a weapon she’s learned to sheath when necessary.
Her eyes go first to Teddy, soften without asking anyone’s leave, and then to Harri, sharpening with interest.
“You’re very small,” she says, not unkindly. “I mean that as a compliment. Small people survive catastrophes. We slip through cracks. Big men get crushed.” She spares Nik a sideways look so practiced it might be a family heirloom. “Ask him.”
“Do come in, Rebekah,” Nik says, because manners on his tongue always taste slightly like mockery.
“I will,” she answers, breezing past him. To Harri: “You truly called him a family man? In public? We owe you a monument.”
Harri discovers it is possible to like a woman before you trust her. “I was improvising,” she says.
“Keep doing it.” Rebekah leans out the window, inhales the evening—the street barrow clatter, the fry-smell, the sly hush of something supernatural keeping its feet up for now.
“This city,” she says, and it sounds like both prayer and threat. Then to Harri, quieter: “If you mean to stay, we’ll make a life that fits around you, not the other way. Do not let him bully you into his shape. He is very good at it.”
“Rebekah,” Nik says, a warning that cannot strip itself of affection.
“What?” she says, innocent as a saint. “I’m welcoming our sister.”
Harri stills. The word lands where her bones kept a space.
Rebekah sees it. “Forgive me,” she says, not embarrassed. “I do not mean to burden you with us before you’ve decided you want the curse. Sister is a heavy thing in our house. It endorses atrocities.”
“I’m familiar,” Harri says softly, and Rebekah’s hand grazes her forearm, gentle, fleeting, as if to say yes, I see the ghost you’re carrying.
They drink something Rebekah insists is not blood and not poison and tastes faintly of oranges that were allowed to think too long.
They sit with the window open and let the city spill in.
Rebekah tells a story about a dressmaker who tried to hex her into paying full price; Harri tells one about a hat she wore until it died because a man she loved laughed when she first put it on; Nik interrupts only to improve the dramatics, for which Rebekah tells him to go paint himself something honest.
When Rebekah leaves, she kisses Teddy’s hair and says, “If my brother breaks your heart, do it back.”
“I will,” Harri says, and something dangerous and true passes between the women that does not require Nik’s understanding.
They argue the next afternoon, because the city insists on being itself and men insist on being unwise.
A witch with too-plucked eyebrows tries to sell Harri a safehouse with wards that smell wrong. She declines politely, twice, then not politely, once.
The witch, affronted, raises her hand with a word on her tongue that tastes like compulsion. It doesn’t land. Harri is not a girl who can be shoved anymore. But the gesture is enough to push Nik from amused distance to motion.
He is simply there—between, around, entire. The word dissolves against him as water does when it remembers stone. He looks at the witch like a patient teacher looks at a knife. “Run,” he suggests, almost tender, and she does, because instinct predates pride.
“What were you going to do?” Harri asks, after the thrum in her blood stops imitating a snare drum.
“Remove a problem,” he says.
“She wasn’t a problem.”
“She thought you were prey.” His eyes are not cruel. They are something more dangerous: certain.
“I have been prey,” Harri says, steady. “I did not stay that way.”
“Is this pride?” he asks.
“It is information,” she says. “And reminder: I came here to belong to my own choosing, not to be curated.”
He watches her in that considering way she both despises and hopes for. “You will let me protect what is mine,” he says, softer than a command should be.
She should bristle at the word.
Mine.
It should smoke in her collarbone like a brand. Instead, what the bond carries from him is not ownership taught by empires but keeping learned in hunger. You, not from conquest, but from care. She swallows against the recognition.
“I will,” she says at last, and the words cost her some pride and no dignity. “When it is a dragon. Not when it is a woman with sharp eyebrows and a bad sales pitch.”
A curve of mouth that concedes. “I can distinguish between the two,” he says.
“Can you?” she counters.
“Usually when you tell me,” he admits, infuriating and perfect.
“Then listen,” she says.
“I am,” he says, and the way he says it makes the courtyard tilt a fraction toward something like grace.
He shows her the studio the same evening, not because he means to, she thinks, but because he cannot help it.
The door at the back of the hall she had mistaken for a pantry opens into a room with higher ceilings and a jealousy of light.
Canvases lean like bodies at rest. The smell is turpentine and patience and someone trying not to think too hard.
She stops on the threshold. “You told me you paint when you cannot sleep,” she says, even though the bond lets him feel the recognition slide through her.
“I tell you many things,” he says, which is, today, an apology.
The largest canvas faces the window. The river runs through it, not as a postcard does but as an artery would—there is a vein-blue that seems to move even when the air is still.
A figure walks the river’s margin, small and stubborn, shoulders set toward a dark that has teeth. She knows the slope of that back. She has seen it in shopfronts and in mirrors and as a child’s shadow in the Mirror of Erised, lonely and furious.
“Is that me?” she whispers, the old question worn soft in her mouth.
“It always has been,” he says, and it isn’t a trick, and it isn’t a romantic line; it is simply the truth standing without apology in the room.
She stands very still. He does not crowd the moment. He looks like he wants to, which is almost better.
“What do you see,” she says, “when you look at it?”
“Something I did not deserve,” he answers. Then, because he cannot leave himself soft for long: “And something that, inexplicably, did not run when I growled.”
“I did run,” she says, and the honesty tastes like metal. “I just ran toward.”
“Reckless,” he says, pride like a bruise.
“Cowardly would have been staying,” she says. “I’ve done enough of that.”
“Then,” he says, and steps back as if making space is a language he is learning, “we will build you a life that requires less running.”
“Promises are heavy,” she warns.
“I am strong,” he answers, not amused.
She looks at the river again and thinks of weights she has chosen, and of how choosing is not the same as being spared.
He tells her more about the siblings over the following days, not as confession, but as anecdotes that carry knives with the jokes.
About Elijah reading to him when they were children from a book that had fewer pages each winter; about Rebekah’s practice of adopting stray girls and teaching them to wield cutlery like queens; about Kol inventing a spell to make thunder taste of sugar and nearly killing the quarter-mile of people who believed him when he said it was harmless.
“They are terrible,” Harri says with fondness.
“They are mine,” he says like a benediction he doesn’t believe he has the right to speak aloud.
“Your mother?” she asks carefully, because the word is a mine in many languages.
“Made a curse,” he says, and does not blink. “Called it love. Wore both like a perfume. We learned to hold our breath.”
“And your father?”
“A hammer,” he replies, same as she has sometimes thought of another man she loved and survived. “He made sons the way some men make tables—useful until they break and then worth the wood.”
She inhales against the shared language of certain kinds of fathers. “I’m sorry,” she says, which is inadequate and correct.
“Do not be,” he says. “I have stopped being a table.”
She laughs despite herself, and it is ugly and good.
A week is only seven days to the clock. To a bond that has been humming for years, it is a storm’s eye. There are calm hours when she forgets that cities can drown. There are sudden gusts that remind her to find the high ground.
On the seventh night, the air tastes like copper. Thunder froths beyond the river as if the Gulf is irritated and intends to say so.
Teddy will not decide on sleep; he chooses instead to wage a campaign against it with all available artillery. Harri hums to him, then sings, soft and sometimes flat, because perfect things shatter quickest and she will not tempt it into being tidy.
He surrenders with honour, face sweaty, hair a puddle-colour one shade above dream.
She stays by the crib long past necessity, the old reflex of watching what she cannot bear to lose. When she turns, Nik is in the doorway like a promise she has not decided to claim.
“It will rain,” he says.
“Good,” she replies. “The heat needed a scolding.”
He comes in on quiet feet, the kind that learned their silence under trees that had names and wolves that answered. They stand side by side, looking at the sleep they are both learning around.
“Tell me something true,” she says, because the night has teeth and she refuses to flinch.
He huffs, amused and resigned. “I once tried to teach myself to play trumpet to impress a girl,” he says. “Rebekah threatened to dagger me if I continued. I respected her judgment and wooed the girl by other means.”
“What means?” she asks, unable not to.
“I took a man’s hand off when he cornered her in an alley,” he says, matter-of-fact. “She found it very romantic. We were ill-suited and parted amicably after a decade.”
Harri rubs her eyebrow as if smoothing that story could make it a different shape. “You are not allowed to dismember anyone for me,” she says.
“I have not,” he points out, maddening.
“Nor plan to,” she clarifies.
He considers. “I plan to prevent the need,” he says, which is a weasel’s sentence and also, possibly, grace in his grammar.
She decides to allow it, for the duration of the storm only.
“Your turn,” he says, amused. “Say something true.”
She watches Teddy breathe. “I thought,” she says, and her voice refuses to be clever, “that the Mirror showed me madness. That I made you up to survive.”
“It showed you a doorway,” he says, so gently she almost misses the edge. “You walked through. That part was you.”
Lightning hazes the room white and then gone. The thunder waits politely to be introduced. The house breathes.
“Sit,” he says, and they do, on the floor beside the crib like children exiled from a holiday table.
They talk about small things and one large thing—the question of safety, which is not a place but a verb. He tells her what streets he wants her to avoid when the air smells like metal. She tells him where she refuses to wear a veil of fear. They draft an accord in glances and the grace of concession.
It is imperfect and good.
When the storm finally remembers its appointment and commits, they lean against the same wall, not touching, and watch the window scribble.
He recites, without remarking on it, the names of every woman on the block whose husbands turn unkind during thunder. She stores the list, because she has magic and a spine and a city to belong to that will not become gentler on its own.
“Family man,” she says, very softly, not a joke now.
He does not deny it. “Say it again,” he says, as if repetition might turn the word into something true in his mouth.
“Family,” she says, and this time the bond thrums not sharp, but sure.
She writes the letters two days after the storm, at the small table by the window that has decided to be her desk.
The lemon tree throws a broken pattern across the page. The house keeps her secrets like a held breath.
She begins with Andromeda, because love that lets you go, even if it hurts them, deserves first reply.
Andy,
The city is louder than any church bell, louder than grief when it first arrives. Teddy loves it. He points at boats and forgives the gulls for their manners. We are safe. I do not use that word lightly. It does not mean spared; it means held.
The house Nik found is stubborn and kind. It is the sort that decides who may live in it; it has not evicted us yet. The courtyard pretends it remembers water. There is a lemon tree that tries. I am trying too.
I will write each week, as promised. Tell me what you are planting. Tell me if the window sticks. Tell me when you laugh.
He is constant. You may not like the word, but it is true.
Your Harri
She seals it with wax because traditions soothe the part of her that fought a war without instruction manuals. She sets it aside with a strand of the red ribbon tied around it.
Molly and Arthur next, because worry is a job they were born to. She addresses it as Mum and Dad, because it is what they have become.
Mum, Dad,
Please don’t fret at the word ‘Niklaus.’ You can tuck it into a drawer with the other words you decided not to say aloud because they hurt your mouths. If you need a different word, try ‘someone who stays.’
The food is too sweet and then not at all; I like it. The shops sell everything and a little more. I am learning to tell the difference between a blessing and a sales pitch. I thought of you today, Dad—there’s a street where the lights hum like something alive. I will take them apart with you in a story when I have more names for the wires.
Teddy is learning stairs with a stubbornness you would admire and forbid. He calls doors ‘dah.’ Don’t tell him.
I will write.
Love, Harri
She smiles at the page as if it were a face and lets the smile stay.
Hermione and Ron, shared letter, because their love has become one room with two windows.
You two,
The bond is… what we thought. Not a chain. A compass. It hums when I lie to myself. I am trying to be interesting enough to deserve it.
Hermione, you were right about habits that feel like safety and are actually fear in a dress. I’m taking off the dress one button at a time. Ron, you were right that beignets are just doughnuts with better PR.
I like him. He frightens me. Both are true. I’m learning to speak in ‘both.’
Write to me about small things—the kettle whistle, the way the Burrow sounded in last week’s wind, what colour cardigan Mrs. Figg wore to market. I want a rope of ordinary to hold onto when the city tries to make me myth.
H.
She closes her eyes on that, lets the ache be a companion in the chair beside her, not a thing perched on her chest.
Ginny, separate, because sisters are a language of their own.
Gin,
You’d like the women here. They stare back when stared at. They wear knives like they are part of a matching set. I have learned to nod instead of smile when a man thinks I should.
I miss how we used to kick our heels against chairs in the kitchen as if we could shake a clock loose. I miss you in my ribs.
He paints. He didn’t tell me how well. You would be insufferable about the romance of it; I will allow it when you visit. Come in autumn. The air might be less feral by then.
I am happy in pieces. The pieces are arranging themselves.
Love you.
H.
Neville, because gentleness deserves an update.
Neville,
Your cutting is braver than I am. It has decided the windowsill belongs to it and is warming the wall with its stubborn chlorophyll. It smells faintly of Hogwarts when the sun remembers the lake. Thank you.
If you write back and tell me that I am doing an adequate job of being alive, I will believe you.
H.
She stacks the letters, ties them with the ribbon, and sets them where she will not lose them between storms.
“Writing?” Nik says from the doorway, casual as if he has always belonged there. He watches her as if reading the air for meaning.
“Warding,” she corrects. “Different ink. Similar idea.”
He comes closer, touches the ribbon bow with one finger as if it might bruise. “Good,” he says again. “Leave space for new people to live inside you without throwing out the old tenants. That is a trick even we don’t learn fast.”
“I thought you didn’t value tricks,” she says.
“I value survival,” he answers. “By whatever name you clothe it.”
She does not tell him he is getting better at saying the quiet things loudly. He hears the praise anyway. His mouth refuses the smile and then accepts it
Teddy barrels in from the courtyard with Rebekah behind him like a parade that has refused a permit.
He carries a lemon that is too green, a trophy from a brave tree. His hair is triumphant-gold. He thrusts the fruit at Harri, at Nik, at the future.
“Dah!” he declares to all of it.
“Yes,” Harri says. “Door.”
“Yes,” Nik says, mischief and vow. “Door.”
He looks at Harri then, something dangerous and promising both. “Shall we open one?” he asks, meaning a hundred things.
“We already have,” she says, and the chapter, if it needed a formal ending, could end there. But the city, indifferent to literature, keeps singing, and the river keeps its patient heart, and the lemon tree, stupid and brave, puts out one more leaf toward a sun that is not gentle and is, anyway, enough.
That night, when Teddy sleeps, Harri sits in the studio without touching anything and lets the rain-smell of turpentine and canvas etch itself into the part of her that makes anchors.
Nik paints with his back to her—river, sky, the edge of a woman who does not look away. She drafts three more letters in her head—to herself ten years ago, to herself ten years hence, to the part of her that believed she was a ruin disguised as a girl.
She does not write those. She lives them instead, in a city that does not whisper but shouts, with a man who would have been a storm if he had not decided to hope, with a boy whose hair refuses to pick a colour because happiness is loud and he intends to be it.
The bond hums. Not a chain. A compass.
Somewhere outside, thunder invents a story about distance. The house believes, and stays.