The dream that returned

One morning, one of many mornings of bumping into Michael at the grocery store, church, and even the town festival, the bookstore bell jingled before Elizabeth even reached the counter.

She turned.

Lily stood in the doorway, her small hand pressed against the glass pane as if anchoring herself.

She wore the same moss-green coat as before, a soft pink ribbon tying back her hair. In her other hand, she held a piece of folded paper — worn, creased at the corners. She clutched it like a treasure.

Elizabeth knelt slowly, her heart catching.

Lily stepped forward and offered the note wordlessly. Elizabeth took it with both hands, gently, as though accepting a secret she wasn't sure she deserved.

Inside, Lily had written:

The dreamer remembers things I can't say out loud.

That makes it feel safe inside again.

There was no drawing this time. Just a small, taped leaf from the tree in front of the bookstore ; red-tipped, wind-carved. Something that had held on despite adversity.

Elizabeth blinked hard. Her tears threatened to spill.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Lily smiled. Only a flicker. But there.

Then she moved to the reading table, climbed into her usual seat, and opened a book like the world hadn't changed.

But it had.

Mary sat in her corner in quiet observation. Her features betrayed solemnity.

Elizabeth's POV

The house was quiet, save for the ticking of the mantle clock and the patterned shush of the sea beyond the window.

The cinnamon and clove tea made to alleviate her soft cramp laid untouched. Cold even.

She sat on the floor of the living room with Jeremy's old sketchbook open in front of her. Not the one she'd looked at before ... this was another. Tucked at the bottom of the box marked Not Yet.

The pages smelled faintly of graphite and ocean salt — a strange, aching comfort.

She flipped slowly, past pages of incomplete Dreamer ideas, notes to himself in smudged ink: "Fix her eyes. Too old." "Make the stars messier because dreams aren't neat."

Then she found it.

A full spread. An illustration she didn't remember seeing before.

The Dreamer girl. Kneeling on a rooftop, surrounded by children, curled like commas in sleep. Her face was half-lit, half-shadowed. And in her lap, something glowing.

Words were scribbled around the border, half-poem, half-confession.

She protects what silence leaves behind.

She keeps the pieces of you that grief tries to erase.

She carries stars in her pockets, so no night is truly empty.

Elizabeth smoothed the edge of the page with the pad of her thumb.

And for the first time in a long time, she cried, not with fury or guilt, but with softness. Like her body had remembered how.

She closed the book and pressed it to her chest.

And whispered, "I think I'm still here."

She closed her eyes.

She could see it so clearly—the two of them in the garden behind the old house they rented when their love was still new. Jeremy, on the marble steps, sketchbook balanced on his knee, his fingers perpetually stained with charcoal and ink. She, sprawled on the sun-warmed blanket with her notebook, writing scenes he would later bring to life through illustration.

"I want to draw the way your words feel," he had said once, pausing to look at her. "They're like warmth, but also like rain. So familiar, it hurts."

And she had laughed then. Young, glowing, unaware that a day would come when those sketches would outlive the man who made them.

Elizabeth blinked back the sudden sting behind her eyes. Her fingers trembled as she turned the page. A single sketch Jeremy had tucked between the leaves: a drawing of her asleep, her hair a wild tumble around her cheek, a pen still in her fingers.

She pressed her hand flat over the image.

The silence of the house had once comforted her. Now, it only echoed. Until recently.

Lily.

That small, quiet child with eyes like dusk and dreams still stuck to her skin.

Lily had tiptoed into her world like a forgotten melody, pulling the edges of Elizabeth's heart back together, one soft wordless glance at a time.

She reminded Elizabeth of herself as a girl...curious, cautious, always listening. And sometimes… sometimes, Lily reminded her of Jeremy.

Not in appearance. But in essence.

The way Lily tilted her head when she was curious. The way she sat beside Elizabeth in silence that wasn't heavy, wasn't awkward. Just… full.

She looked out her window and there was Michael.

Elizabeth exhaled slowly, laying her pen down.

Michael didn't sketch. He didn't write. But, he stood in her doorway with Luna curled on his hip and a softness in his eyes that contradicted the gruffness of his beard and quiet voice.

Something about him did remind her of Jeremy. Not in the way he looked, but in the way he made space for her. The quiet way he noticed when she needed something—without asking. The way he fixed her broken garden gate, the day they met at the beach, and he walked her home. The way he handed her tea with both hands, as if passing something sacred.

But this wasn't Jeremy. This wasn't the past.

This was different. Softer. Slower. More weathered.

Elizabeth leaned back and let her eyes roam the walls of the cottage, dotted with faded photographs and crooked frames. Her life had ended and restarted here. She had died when Jeremy died.

Somewhere in between her thoughts, the gentle rustle of Lily's feet and the low hum of Michael's voice brought her out of reverie.

She handed a neatly folded note to him, for Lily. As she has been doing for the past few days.

Then, exhaled slowly.

She had started breathing again.

She wasn't whole. Not yet.

But she was… here.

She picked up the pen again and began to write, not for the town, not for the children waiting at the bookshop, but for herself.

For Jeremy.

For the pieces of him that still whispered through ink and memory.

And maybe... just maybe... for Lily, too.

Her walk to the porch was calculated. Even.

The soft wind thrashed her hair across her face. It seemed to whisper:

"I see you. Finally, you're back."

The fireplace crackled low, casting flickering gold across the worn pages Elizabeth had been poring over all afternoon.

The wind clapped and tapped gently at the windowpanes, almost as if asking to be let in. But the cottage, tucked between still branches and memories, held her safe for now.

Elizabeth's pen hovered over the journal she hadn't opened in years. Not her public one... the one the town expected her to fill with warm words and fairy tales, but the leather-bound one Jeremy had given her during their third spring together. The corners were worn now, the pages soft at the edges from too many returns to the same memories.

She closed her eyes. And let herself dream.