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“I know,” he murmurs, voice thick with everything we never got to say. “But you have to.”
The dream shifts again—growing softer at the edges. Hazy. Like it’s giving me one last moment before it fades.
“You don’t belong here, Mya.” Fletch leans back just enough to cup my jaw. His thumb brushes beneath my eye, catching the tear that falls like a star dying. “You were never meant to stay. Not in this lie. Not in this half-life.”
I nod, but it’s not a yes.
It’s a goodbye.
A slow, soul-deep surrender to the truth waiting on the other side.
He studies me for a moment, like he’s memorizing my face. Like he’s trying to burn it into whatever part of himself still dreams of us.
Then he leans in and presses the softest kiss to my forehead.
It’s not romantic.
It’s everything
“I’ll stop loving you when the sky falls,” he says, voice low and reverent, like he’s carving the promise into the stars.
And then—
He lets go.
His warmth vanishes.
His body flickers.
And before I can speak—before I can say it back—
He disappears.
And I’m alone.
Floating in the space between memory and waking.
Grief and breath.
The world isn’t dark.
It isn’t light either.
It’s weightless.
Like I’m floating in the breath between thunder and lightning. That charged moment where the air crackles with something ancient and electric and inevitable.
I can’t feel my body.
But I can feel… something.
A distant echo of warmth near my hand. The softest brush of fabric. A beep. Rhythmic. Familiar.
Steady.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Like a metronome ticking off the seconds of a life I haven’t stepped fully back into.
