The ocean hadn't changed. It still whispered in long, salt-heavy breaths across the sand, as if it remembered her better than she remembered herself.
Mara stood at the edge of the old beach town, boots sinking into the damp shoreline, wind biting her cheeks like a memory that refused to fade. Her coat flapped around her knees. The old pier groaned in the distance—half of it rotted and submerged, the other half stubbornly clinging to life like something too proud to collapse.
She hadn't been here in five years. Not since him.
The town looked like a ghost version of itself. The ice cream shack was boarded up. The windows of the bookshop they once wandered through—fingertips brushing spines, laughing at terrible poetry—were shattered and dust-ridden. Someone had spray-painted "SORRY NEVER FIXED IT" across the shutters.
Mara laughed under her breath. "No, it didn't."
She moved slowly, like the air itself had grown heavier. Her footsteps crunched along the broken boardwalk, and every creak of wood echoed like an old argument.
The sea had eaten away at the shore. So had time.
There was a moment—five summers ago—when this place had felt like Atlantis. Hidden. Untouchable. Magic in a way only the broken could understand.
She and Eliot had arrived with nothing but two duffel bags and a shared ache. He told her he'd left behind a life that didn't want him. She told him she'd been invisible for so long she'd started to think she might not exist. They clung to each other like the last two people alive.
They found a cottage on a cliff. It leaned to one side like it was tired of standing, but it was theirs. The floorboards squeaked, the pipes moaned, and they called it home. She painted sunflowers on the windows. He filled notebooks with songs he never let her read.
They didn't talk much about before. That was the deal.
Mara wandered through the overgrown path leading to that same cottage now. The gate still hung on one hinge. Weeds had eaten the garden. A single blue mug sat on the porch railing, long-forgotten, cracked in two.
She ran her fingers across the chipped paint of the doorframe. We built this town on shaky ground. God, wasn't that the truth? She had loved him with desperation, not peace. They never built anything sturdy. Only escape routes.
Inside, the air smelled of damp wood and dust. The wallpaper peeled. A few old photographs remained pinned above the mantle, curling at the corners. In one, Eliot was kissing her temple, grinning like he had everything he'd ever wanted. Maybe he had. Briefly.
She sat down on the floorboards where their mattress used to be. The silence swallowed her whole.
"I couldn't save us," she whispered aloud, voice cracking. "Couldn't even try."
Her throat burned. Her chest ached like something was clawing at the inside, begging to get out. Regret, maybe. Or whatever was left of love after too much silence.
Outside, the wind shifted. The ocean kept breathing.
She pulled a tiny velvet pouch from her coat pocket. Inside was a rusted compass—his. He used to wear it on a chain, said it was the only thing that ever pointed him somewhere real. One day he stopped wearing it. The same day he stopped kissing her good morning.
Without ceremony, she walked to the cliff's edge. Below, the waves crashed with quiet violence.
She opened the pouch. Held the compass in her palm.
"Goodbye," she said—not to him, but to who she had been.
And then she let go.
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Some things don't sink like Atlantis. Some things wash away, slowly, until they're just salt in the air and ghosts in your bones.