Prologue:
"No matter what happens, let's never forget how we made each other feel, safe, alive, loved."
Amelia read the line three times before she let herself breathe.
The envelope had sat untouched in her drawer for two years, edges gone soft and yellow, the seal she'd pressed with shaking hands one drunk, hopeful midnight now nothing more than a memory of wax.
She'd promised herself she wouldn't open it until the reunion was close enough to taste, until she was brave enough to know if the girl who wrote those words still recognized the woman reading them.
She wasn't sure she did.
Outside, the morning was doing its quiet work, gray light easing gold, the city stirring awake, but Amelia stayed still, the paper trembling faintly between her fingers. Not from the cold. From the weight of it: every late-night confession under skies too full of stars, every silence someone had filled without being asked, every reckless promise made by people who hadn't yet learned how easily distance unravels even the surest love.
The reunion was three days away.
She folded the letter back along its worn crease, slower this time, like closing a wound that hadn't quite decided whether it was healed.
Whatever waited for her this weekend, forgiveness, reckoning, or something she didn't have a name for yet, it had been waiting two years to find her.
She just hoped she was ready to be found.