Page 12 of Stolen Harmony
I dropped my backpack on the floor and set my guitarcase against the wall. The silence was immediate and oppressive after two years of New York's constant noise. No sirens, no traffic, no neighbors arguing through thin walls. Just the creak of old wood settling and the distant sound of seagulls.
I walked to the window and looked out at Harbor's End spreading below me like a postcard from a simpler time. The harbor was busy with the evening fishing fleet heading out, their lights beginning to twinkle in the gathering dusk. Houses climbed the hills in neat rows, most with lights glowing warm and yellow in their windows.
It looked peaceful. Picturesque, even. The kind of place people moved to when they wanted to escape the complications of modern life. But I'd grown up here, and I knew what the postcard didn't show: the way everyone knew everyone else's business, the subtle hierarchies and long-held grudges, the way the town could feel like a trap if you stayed too long.
Still, for the first time since I'd gotten off the train, I felt something that might have been relief. I was here. I'd actually done it—come back to the place I'd spent half my life trying to escape. And so far, I hadn't spontaneously combusted or been run out of town by an angry mob.
Maybe that was something.
I unpacked my few belongings, hanging clothes in the tiny closet and setting my toiletries on the bathroom shelf. The acoustic guitar got propped in the corner where I could see it but wouldn't feel obligated to touch it. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.
As the sun set over Harbor's End, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold, I sat by the window and watched the town settle into evening. Lights came on in houses where families were having dinner, where couples were watching TV, where children were being tucked into bed with stories about adventures infar-off places.
My phone buzzed with a text from Caleb, asking if I'd made it safely. I typed back a quick “Alive and intact,” then turned the phone face-down on the table. Tomorrow would bring more encounters, more questions, more of the careful navigation required to exist in a place where your past was public knowledge.
But for tonight, I was just another light in a window, another life unfolding in this small town by the sea. And for the first time in months, that felt like enough.
Chapter 4
Ghosts at the Door
Elias
The sound of knuckles against wood cut through the silence. Sharp, hesitant, then stronger. More insistent. I set the papers aside and walked to the front door, my socks silent on hardwood that had learned all my rhythms over the past two years. Every creak, every groan, every place where the floorboards shifted under weight.
Through the peephole, I could see a figure hunched against the rain, hood pulled up, face lost in shadows and weather. Probably Mrs. Chen with another casserole and carefully worded concern about my well-being. Or maybe Tom from the bar, sent by some committee of worried friends to check if I was still breathing.
I opened the door and the world cracked open like an egg.
Rowan stood on my porch like something summoned from the deepest part of my guilt-soaked dreams. Rain clung to his dark coat, dripped from the ends of his hair that had grown longer than I remembered. The streetlight behind him threw his face into partial shadow, but I would have known those eyes in complete darkness. Elaine's eyes, dark and careful andholding that same wounded distance she'd worn when she thought I wasn't looking.
The air left my lungs in a rush that sounded like a gasp. Two years. Two years of wondering if I'd imagined the resemblance, if grief had painted his mother's features onto a stranger's face during those few minutes at the funeral. But there was no mistaking it now. The shape of his mouth when it was pressed thin with tension. The way his shoulders curved inward like he was protecting something fragile in his chest. The stubborn set of his jaw that I'd seen a thousand times on Elaine when she was trying not to cry.
My chest felt like someone had reached inside and squeezed my heart until it forgot how to beat properly. This was Elaine's son. Her baby, grown into a man who carried her ghost in every line of his face, every careful movement. The child she'd loved and lost and mourned in ways I'd never fully understood.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, then caught myself. “Sorry. I just... you look...”
“Like my mother?” His voice was rougher than I remembered, scratched with exhaustion and something that might have been pain. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”
The words had an edge that made my stomach clench. How many times had he heard that comparison? How many well-meaning strangers had looked at him and seen a dead woman instead of a living man?
“Rowan.” His name felt foreign on my tongue, heavy with years of silence and all the things I should have said but never found the courage for. “I didn't... I wasn't expecting...”
“Yeah, well. Life's full of surprises.” He shifted his weight, rain dripping from his coat onto the porch boards. Water pooled at his feet like tears the sky was crying for both of us. “Can I come in? It's fucking freezing out here.”
“Of course. Christ, yes, come in.” I stepped back, nearly tripping over my own feet in my haste to get out of his way. “You're soaked through.”
He crossed the threshold like he was stepping into enemy territory, eyes scanning the hallway with the careful attention of someone who'd learned not to trust safe spaces. His gaze catalogued details: the photographs lining the walls, the reading glasses Elaine had left on the hall table, the red coat still hanging on the hook by the door like she might walk through it any minute.
I watched his face as he took it all in, saw the moment he recognized things that had belonged to his mother. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, a muscle jumping beneath stubbled skin. His hands, which had been loose at his sides, slowly curled into fists.
“You still live here,” he said, and it wasn't a question.
“For three years. She loved this house.” The words came out before I could stop them, heavy with the weight of memory. “She said it felt like the kind of place where people wrote love letters and kept secrets.”
Something flickered across his face, too quick for me to read. Pain, maybe. Or anger. Or the complicated mixture of both that came with loving someone you'd lost before you'd figured out how to keep them.
“She always was a romantic.” His voice was carefully neutral, but I heard the crack underneath. He glanced around the hallway, taking in the unchanged details, then looked back at me with something sharper in his expression.
