The romantic fiction collections she used to read—the ones with the foiled covers and the yearning glances—they never wrote about this kind of love. The kind that left you hollow. The kind where your entire heartbeat lived outside your chest, tangled in the IV lines of a hospital bed.
“I dreamed of you,” he said, his voice cracking. “I was lost. In a dark, cold place. No story to write. No ending. And then I heard you. You were playing that Chopin nocturne. The one you played when Dad left. You told me… you said, ‘Follow the sound, Liam. Follow it home.’”
And in that moment, Eleanor Vance realized: this was the greatest love story of her life. No hero. No villain. Just a woman, a boy, and a melody that refused to die.