Page 84 of The Story Between Us

He didn’t answer.

That’s not living, Nate. That’s just not dying.

“I know.”

So stop being an idiot. Finish the book. Kiss the girl.

He laughed. Actually laughed. It came out wet, somewhere between humor and grief.

He walked to her window. It looked out over the lawn to Lila’s house. Livvie’s light still burned.

“There’s a kid. Sam. Make-A-Wish. He wants to meet the author. And I’ve been avoiding the letter because meeting him means admitting the books are mine too. That I’m not just your⁠—”

He couldn’t finish.

You were never just my anything. We wrote them together. But you’re still here, Nate. You get to keep writing. Don’t waste that.

“I miss you.”

I know.

“I’m always going to miss you.”

I know that too. A pause. Or what felt like a pause. Probably just his memories, conjuring up what she might say next. But missing me doesn’t mean you have to stop living. It just means you carry me with you while you do.

He stood. Crossed to her desk. Took the sticky note from the corkboard—her handwriting about the protégé, about letting go.

It’s not lost. You just don’t see it right now.

“I think I’m ready, Em.”

He tucked the sticky note in his pocket. Brushed his hand over the gray cardigan draping her chair.

“I think I’m ready to live again.”

He left the room. Closed the door gently behind him.

The hallway was dark, but it felt different now. The house was still quiet, but the silence had changed, no longer empty but expectant. Like something had been waiting for him to catch up.

He walked back to his desk. Sat down. The cursor still blinked on the document where he’d left it.

He scrolled up, found the scene he’d been avoiding for weeks. The one where Morvain’s apprentice was standing at his mentor’s grave. The one that required him to write grief honestly—not the poetic kind, not the distant kind, but the ugly specific kind that lived in your chest and made it hard to breathe.

He started typing.

The words came. Not easily—but they came. Raw and rough and true.

Aldric stood at the grave as the sun set, and he did not know how to be a person who existed in a world where his mentor did not.

This was the truth he’d been avoiding. Not that Master Morvain was dead—he knew that, had known it for months, had watched the light leave his eyes. But knowing and accepting were different kingdoms, separated by a wall he could not scale.

But just like the Wall of Sorrow, this wasn’t stone. It wasn’t magic.

It was just fear.

Fear that moving forward meant leaving Morvain behind. Fear that wanting things—wanting to complete the quest, wanting to master his power, wanting to live—was a betrayal of the man who’d given everything so Aldric could survive.

But standing at this grave, in the fading light, Aldric understood something he hadn’t before.